Reeling in a record in Louisiana

Red Man angler Ed Stellner lands the largemouth of a lifetime

* Editor’s note: This story first ran on OperationBass.com Sept. 5, 2000, prior to the 2000 Wal-Mart FLW Tour Championship, which was held in Shreveport, La. With the FLW’s return to Shreveport this May, we are revisiting the story of Ed Stellner’s record fish with the VISA $2 Million Challenge in mind for next week’s competition. No Louisiana largemouth or spotted bass state records have been broken since this story first ran.
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The largemouth bass didn’t make much of a fuss when she hit Ed Stellner’s Smithwick Rogue. She kind of lumbered up from beneath the cypress trees and sucked down the plug with the subtlety of a Shop-Vac picking up lint, but she didn’t roil the water at all. All Stellner knew was that she was a big one when she bit, but he had no idea how big.

“It just rolled over like a big old sow when it hit,” he said. “When I set the hook, it turned its head and just wallowed back and forth. It was over in 10 seconds. A 5-pound smallmouth would have put up a better fight.”

But it wouldn’t have put up a better weight. The 15.31-pound lunker turned out to be the heaviest largemouth caught in the state of Louisiana in 2000 (Louisiana officials measure record fish in hundredths of a pound). It fell just over six-tenths of a pound short of the all-time Louisiana state largemouth record of 15.97 pounds set by Greg Wiggins in 1994.

Stellner, an engineering director from Onalaska, Wis., is active in the bass fishing community in the Coulee Region around La Crosse. Sponsored by Ranger Boats, he has fished competitively on the Red Man Tournament Trail since 1996 and chaired the committee that hosted the 1999 Red Man All-American Championship in La Crosse.

In February, friend and former co-worker Ross Cagle, a well-known fishing guide on Lake D’Arbonne in northern Louisiana who is also sponsored by Ranger, invited him down to big bass country for the spring spawning and pre-spawning action. It was Stellner’s first trip to Louisiana, a trip he made specifically to chase monster bass.

It turned into the fishing trip of a lifetime.

Introducing a bigger breed of bass

In the mid `80s, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries began stocking the state’s lakes with Florida-strain largemouth to increase the size of its bass fisheries. For years, the state-record largemouth weight peaked at around 12 pounds. Then in 1992, that limit was blown out of the water as the new Florida-strain bass began to make their mark.

“That’s when we first started seeing the fish growth rates kick into high gear,” said Tim Morrison of the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. “In 1992, that’s when Caney Lake kicked in.”

Caney Lake. For Louisiana bass anglers, that lake’s name is synonymous with record bass, and is probably the most notorious of the Florida-strain-enhanced lakes. Of the top 20 record largemouths in the state – including Wiggins’ current record at number one – 16 of them were caught in Caney Lake. All of them were caught after March 1992. The Florida-strain bass have taken over the leaderboard to the point where a mere 1.66 pounds separates the largest largemouth from the 20th. Eighteen other record fish are sandwiched in between.

By 1996, Caney Lake began to fall off the board, however, allowing other lakes to flex their own Florida-enhanced bass muscle: Kraig Welborn recorded a 14.68 out of Toledo Bend Reservoir in March 1998, while Brett Fontenot weighed a 15.05 out of Miller’s Lake the same month.

But one of the prime candidates for the next state-record largemouth is Lake D’Arbonne. Before Caney, D’Arbonne proudly held the state largemouth record for years. While Caney stole the limelight in the mid-`90s, anglers say D’Arbonne is poised to take the record back – maybe even cracking the 16-pound barrier – as its own Florida-strain bass come of age.

“It’s going to produce the next record fish,” said Bill Ford, chairman of the Louisiana Outdoor Writers Association, which documents and keeps the state fish records. “Stellner’s is the largest fish that’s been caught in Louisiana in nearly five years.”

Indeed, it was the allure of 10- to 12-pounders that brought Stellner to D’Arbonne. His previous personal best bass was a 6-pound, 8-ounce smallmouth he pulled from his home waters of Lake Onalaska in Wisconsin. When Cagle invited him down to fish D’Arbonne for a few days before a local tournament, Stellner jumped at the chance.

“The reason I went down there was for the big fish,” Stellner said. “I mean a 10-pound bass down there is kind of normal.”

Seventh largest bass in Louisiana

On Feb. 18 around 1:30 p.m., Stellner and Cagle were flipping jigs in about seven feet of water among the cypress trees in Bear Creek, a finger body of water on Lake D’Arbonne. Stellner decided to try his orange-and-black Rogue and made his historic cast, hooking the huge bass.

When he reeled the large lady to the boat, Cagle reached down with one hand to land her. No dice. Her immensity and weight thwarted his first attempt to heave her into the boat.

“We knew it was a big fish, but we didn’t think much of it at first,” Cagle said. “Then when I looked down and saw a mouth that was 8 inches across, I knew it was a two-hand fish.”

The two men combined their efforts and finally landed her. When they weighed her with two different portable scales, one gauge read “14-4” and the other said “ER,” or error.

Knowing they were making history that afternoon on Lake D’Arbonne, Cagle called ahead to his friends at the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries to tell them they were bringing in a record. When the two men arrived to shore, there were about 35 people, including the local mayor, waiting to see what kind of leviathan Stellner had pulled out of their lake. After a moment to take photos, Stellner waited outside as district fisheries supervisor Mike Wood took the official measurements at D’Arbonne Lake Motel and Marina.

“I was so nervous, I didn’t want to go in there and see what it was,” Stellner admitted.

Wood came back with the official weight of 15.31 pounds for the bass. The 47-year-old Wisconsin native smashed the Lake D’Arbonne record of 13.06 pounds and landed seventh on the all-time Louisiana state largemouth record list.

By Stellner’s own account, it was “the fish of a lifetime. There are so many people who fish across the country. Most of them will never be able to say they caught a 15-pound bass.”

For Cagle, too, Stellner’s unofficial guide that day whose personal best on D’Arbonne is a 12 1/2-pound largemouth, the fish was a monumental event.

“I was ecstatic,” he said. “For anybody who’s in the boat when somebody catches a fish that big, it’s hellacious.” Plus, he’s not ashamed to admit that word of Stellner’s lake record has done wonders for his guiding business.

The bittersweet coda to Stellner’s story came when he turned his fish over to the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries as part of the Louisiana Lunker Bass Program. Through the program, anglers donate bass 13 pounds or heavier for spawning, exhibiting or research purposes. Three weeks after Stellner caught her, Wood called to tell him they had to release his record bass before they could use her for spawning. “They aged her and found she was 11 years old,” Stellner said.

Wood also mentioned that the 15.31-pound fish had already spawned by the time Stellner caught her in the shallow water. If he had caught her maybe a week earlier, the extra weight almost certainly would have put his fish over the 16-pound barrier and pushed him into first place in the record books.

Lamented Stellner, “He said she might have had 1 1/2 to 2 pounds of spawn.”

A million-dollar state record?

As Lake D’Arbonne anglers can attest, Caney Lake no longer reigns supreme as Louisiana’s one-stop shop for record largemouth. The Louisiana Lunker Bass Program is juicing up the largemouth population on waterways throughout the state. Places like Toledo Bend Reservoir, Miller’s Lake and False River are also producing 12- to 13-pound largemouths on a regular basis. The likelihood of one of the other Florida-strain-enhanced waterways producing a record-breaker only increases as the Department of Wildlife and Resources continues its selective breeding and stocking, and the fish come of age.

“We are oriented to making sure the fishermen in this state are happy,” said Morrison, “and that means we’re focused on increasing the quality of the fishing.”
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When the Wal-Mart FLW Tour brings its high-energy bass-fishing event to Shreveport May 16-19, don’t exclude the possibility of a state record coming out of the Red River during the tournament. The FLW brings 350 of the world’s best pros and co-anglers all to the same spot, and they all have the same ultimate goal: to catch big bass. And don’t think they won’t be gunning for a record. The VISA $2 Million Challenge offers a million dollars to any angler who succeeds in landing a state-record bass in competition, as well as one lucky fan paired with the angler in the promotion.

Combine that with Louisiana’s propensity for coughing up state-record bass over the last 10 years and it all points to one thing: State records beware, the FLW’s coming to town.

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