LUMBERPORT, W.Va. — West Virginia has seen several fish records fall in the past couple of years, but new records for black bass in the Mountain State are rare. That changed Thursday when Seth Spry of Lumberport, W.Va. hooked a live bluegill on his line and cast into the cover of a private farm pond in Harrison County.
“You can tell when a bass is after it, they go absolutely crazy. They start coming to the back front, left, right, up down, to the surface, you name it.,” explained Spry in an interview about the catch.
The bluegill, being fished under a bobber, was desperately seeking an escape route and as it arrived at the surface a gigantic mouth followed along with an intense swirl.
“It was fluttering on the surface. She hit it on top and it sounded and looked like an explosion there by my bobber. It was one of the craziest things I had ever seen,” he added.
Spry wasn’t completely surprised by the fish. In fact, he’d been after her for two weeks after he got her to bite and she threw the hook a few days earlier. He feared it was going to be deja-vu.
“As soon as I hooked the fish, it did the exact same thing it did previously. It jumped out of the water and it was the same fish. It was a giant, but I didn’t know how big it was.. It went deep and stayed down until I pulled him up to the bank and I knew it was a caliber fish I had never caught before.,”
Listen to “Seth Spry — Record Largemouth” on Spreaker.
The massive fish weighed 9.85 pounds and stretched the tape measure to 26.378 inches. The latter measurement was enough to earn the fish a spot in the books as the new state record for length on a largemouth bass. It replaced the old record of 25.75 inches caught by Eli Gain at Dog Run Lake in Harrison County. His record had stood since 2001. Although Spry’s fish was an impressive 9.85 pounds, it is well shy of what may be one of the most coveted fish records in West Virginia, the 12.28 pound largemouth caught by David Heeter from a Grant County Farm Pond in 1994. Spry said his fish might have come close if he hadn’t lost her two weeks
ago.
“I really wish I had caught her a month ago before she spawned out. She really had the potential to be in that 12 pound range before the spawn. Of course now, she was real skinny and spawned out,” he said.
Although he caught the record fish on a live bluegill, Spry said he had used a number of different baits trying to catch the big one including several large swim baits in the past couple of weeks. He ended up catching a couple of other trophy sized fish, including another largemouth in the six-pound range.
DNR Biologist Dustin Smith came to the location of the catch to certify the weight on the DNR’s mobile scale equipment and once the measurements were official and the pictures were taken, the big bass was released back into the water to hopefully be caught another day.