Millions of dollars have been offered in bounty, fortunes and reputations have been made and ruined, one unlucky fisherman even ended up in jail, but the story of the most coveted and controversial fishing record in the world begins with a single thunderclap. 

Georgia, USA 1932

That thunderclap decided for 20-year old George Washington Perry that he wouldn’t be plowing that morning on his family’s subsistence farm in the backwoods of Georgia. Instead, he and fishing partner Jack Page would take the day off for a little hard-earned recreation. 

Under gloomy skies, they drove twenty some miles through Telfair County to Montgomery Lake, an ox-bow of the Ocmulgee River, where Perry had stashed a homemade boat cobbled together from barn boards. He and Page took turns rowing and casting the single bass lure they owned between them, a Creek Chub Company Wiggle Fish, which imitated a small perch swimming in the surface layers.

After an hour of fishing the rain-swollen lake and catching their breath any time the lure snagged the roots of the cypress trees they were casting toward, George spotted a disturbance in the water and cast towards it:

“I don’t remember many of the details but all at once the water splashed everywhere. I do remember striking, then raring back and trying to reel. But nothing budged. I thought sure I’d lost the fish – that he’d dived and hung me up. I had no idea how big the fish was, but that didn’t matter. What had me worried was losing the lure.”

After a short jagged fight the two friends indeed got their lure back and attached to it in the muddy water was an enormous female largemouth bass. Once in the boat they were able to take in its jaw-dropping girth and knew that they’d caught something special. 

They packed up and headed twenty minutes down the road to Jesse Hall’s general store in Helena, where the spawn-bound fish was taped at 32.5 inches long and 28.5 inches round by the store’s owner, who was also a public notary. He then escorted the boys and their trophy to the local post office for an official weighing on a government certified scale.

A five-pound largemouth is, even now, a very satisfactory fish. A seven or eight pounder would set lake records in some parts of the country, and a fish over 10 pounds is the universal dream for America’s 10 million obsessive bass anglers. 

The post office scale registered the fish at 22 lbs. 4 oz., unbeknownst to everyone there, beating by more than two pounds the previous All-Tackle World Record. A small crowd gathered to see the great catch and witnesses later recalled that at least a few photos were taken. 

And then Perry did what any self-respecting head of household would have done during the Depression: he took home that twenty-two pounds of fresh protein and ate it with his family. 

Doubts

Though bass were a popular and respected quarry in the early decades of the 20th century, it wasn’t until the 1960’s and the first national bass tournaments that the sport really began to explode in popularity. 

Insurance salesman and avid bass angler Ray Scott organized the first nationally publicized tournament in 1967 with a first prize of $2,000, and formed the Bass Anglers Sportsman Society (B.A.S.S.) the following year. 

B.A.S.S. began to sanction clubs and stage tournaments all over the US, got the tournaments on primetime TV, published a popular member’s magazine, and promoted strict catch and release. By the early 70’s membership was over 50,000. Today, it is the largest single species fishing organization in the world with half-a-million members. 

Though only a very small fraction of bass anglers target specimen fish, as the years rolled over and Perry’s record went unchallenged, the remarkable and nostalgic story of his capture began to take on mythic proportions.  And like many good monster stories, controversy and doubt began to nip at its fins.

The naysayers include some prominent and respected bass authorities and they’ve variously argued that Perry simply made up the story; that either the post office scale or the stated length and girth measurements must be inaccurate; or that he mistook the fish for a striped bass, the mostly saltwater fish that can also thrive in freshwater and routinely grows to 20 lbs. The photos that were reportedly taken had never surfaced and corroborating witnesses from the scene in Helena had also never come forward with detailed accounts. 

Most mysterious perhaps is the apparent disappearing act of Perry’s fishing partner. Despite intensive sleuthing over the decades by multiple interested parties and journalists, Jack Page, the single corroborating witness to the actual catch, slipped back into rural Georgia that day and seemingly vanished: neither he nor any member of the Page family have ever come forward to discuss the catch.  

Supporters counter that there was very little for Perry to gain at the time by making up the story other than a little regional notoriety and a small prize offered by one of the large outdoor magazines, and that striped bass are such distinctive fish, with a long lean silvery profile and rows of black stripes compared to the portly green and black of a largemouth, that his error would have been quickly corrected.  Several witnesses confirmed a large fish was indeed weighed at the post office, a center of community and business life in that era and a place very likely to have an accurate scale.

Polygraphs Not Admissible

There were only two recorded interviews with Perry about the capture before he died. The most in-depth of those was at the behest of Ray Scott, the founder of B.A.S.S. 

In 1973 he sent writer Terry Drace to interview Perry for Bassmaster, the B.A.S.S. club magazine. Drace was given strict instructions to persuade Perry to agree to a polygraph test.

It’s lost to history why he didn’t manage to do that, whether it was logistical problems or out of respect for Perry’s word, but Drace delivered his story to Bassmaster without the centerpiece. 

Though the article was widely read and admired, Drace was let go from the organization shortly after publication, essentially ending his career as a bass writer. It wouldn’t be the last time Scott’s hand was involved in the record story and attempts to break it.

Castro’s Cuba

The US government instigated its (always somewhat porous) travel ban to Cuba in 1962. In all that time, one of the very few people to be actually tried and sentenced for breaking the ban is a Texan bass angler named Dan Snow, a former employee of B.A.S.S.

In the mid 70’s – perhaps given the greenlight because of Castro’s own love of fishing – Snow had struck an exclusive deal with the Cuban government to escort groups of US anglers down to the communist island in an attempt to break the world record, which had long been rumored to swim around in its neglected lakes.

The arrangement reportedly angered his former boss Ray Scott, who didn’t like a bassy business opportunity snatched out from under him. Scott had used the wealth and connections that came with the rise of B.A.S.S. to become a fundraiser for fellow angler George H.W. Bush, who was elected president in 1988. Snow claims Scott used his political clout to have him arrested and charged under the Trading with the Enemy Act. He was eventually sentenced to three months in jail and given a modest fine, but his business and reputation was ruined, leaving the record bass – real or imagined – to live out its retirement in the Caribbean sunshine. 

Westside

Largemouth bass are native to the southeastern United States but like many iconic American products, they’ve been successfully exported around the world, to Mexico, South America, South Africa, parts of Europe, and Japan. But for record-chasers, it was the introduction of native Florida strain bass into the trout-rich reservoirs of Southern California that turned a haphazard quest into a modern fishing cult. 

In 1959, 20,000 Florida-strain bass fry were stocked into Upper Otay Lake near San Diego on a hunch that these quick growing fish would adapt well to the So Cal climate and deep clear reservoirs. They were later stocked throughout California and after a few years it was clear to biologists that they weren’t only adapting, they were thriving and packing on weight beyond all expectations. The serendipitous reason? It turns out that largemouth bass, just like pike in UK reservoirs, really love a nice soft mouthful of rainbow trout, a forage fish they aren’t usually able to exploit. California dumps incredible numbers of juvenile hatchery trout into its lakes to put a bend in the rod of casual anglers, kids and families, on the opening day of trout season, and it was these fat-rich “candy bars” as local anglers called them, that the bass were gorging on. 

When California bass anglers made the bass-trout connection they quickly realized conventional fishing lures were too small in profile to convincingly imitate these 8- to 10-inch fish. So, just like the counterculture DIY histories of California sports like skateboarding, snowboarding, and surfing, in garages and small workshops around the state amateur lure makers began pouring molds, shaving wood and balsa, to create exact trout replicas. The huge handcrafted baits they perfected – some selling for over $100 each – became known as swimbaits and are now fished all over the globe for all kinds of predatory fish.

Fourteen years after that first stocking, Dave Zimmerlee landed a 20 lb. 15 oz. bass from San Diego’s Lake Miramar, the first 20-pounder since Perry’s fish, 41 years earlier. It began a period of complete domination for California big bass, much to the frustration of anglers and fishery managers from Texas, Florida, and the Deep South. In a list of the top 20 biggest bass of all time, only three slots – albeit pretty important ones – come from outside California.

In an attempt to win back the crown of “World’s Best Bass Fishing,” many Southern states have poured resources into programs to genetically isolate trophy bass and grow-on their progeny, the most well-known of which is Texas’ ShareLunker program. ShareLunker rewards any bass angler who catches a fish over 13 lbs. with a rapid response fishery team who speed out to the captor’s lake, take possession of the prized fish for shipment back to the state aquarium and gift the angler with a certificate and life-size cast of the fish, plus the knowledge they’re doing their bit for the Lone Star State. 

$300,000 a pound

It’s been estimated that the person who breaks the All-Tackle World Record for bass can look forward to a million-dollar payday, culled from tackle endorsements, show appearances and merchandise sales. In 2003 however, a membership group called the Big Bass Record Club (BBRC), fueled by the annual dues of its 10,000 members and underwritten by Lloyds of London, shocked the fishing world by offering an $8 million prize to any club member who broke the record. By this time several California big bass hunters had come close to the record and an elite few had done so more than once, becoming famous, sometimes infamous, for their skill, obsessive dedication and secret strategies. Game on. 

All those zeros offered by the BBRC caught the attention of three young friends – Jed Dickerson, Mac Weakly and Mike Winn – who worked together in the casinos around Carlsbad, CA, and often fished together for whatever came along on Lake Dixon. They began to notice a tall red-haired bass angler haunting Dixon, their home turf, fishing in a strange, deliberate way, drifting a line in his boat staring very intently into the water for hours on end without casting. When they put a name to this character – Mike Long, the best-known big bass angler in California and therefore the world, basically – it didn’t take long for the three amigos to start feverishly planning their own assault on what they knew must be Long’s target, a world record bass worth millions of dollars, swimming around in their own backyard. 

Jed

Though the three friends were keen general anglers they weren’t bass experts like Long and his buddies. No matter: this was their home water, they understood odds and percentages on a professional level, and they were insanely determined. They worked Dixon, a days-only municipal lake with strict access rules, like a team of card counters, with one or another of them always amongst the first anglers on the water to secure prime spots; they pumped more experienced trophy anglers for information, refined their techniques (the most effective, though controversial, being to spot big bass guarding their “nests” of young bass fry around spawning time) and fished continuously – 200 days on the water the first year of their campaign. 

Jed Dickerson was bitten hardest by record fever from the beginning, but what really hardened his resolve reportedly was his first actual interaction with Mike Long. One day in the spring of 2001 Jed had landed a landmark fish in his short bassing career, an 11 pounder. Long was on the lake that day along with a photographer from the popular outdoor magazine Sports Afield. As Dickerson recounts, Long had come over to his boat to congratulate him and asked to “borrow” his fish, with a solemn promise it would be released unharmed. Flattered that his expert rival had taken an interest in his results and by the gift of an expensive swimbait, Dickerson agreed and handed the fish over. 

A few months later, a quietly outraged Dickerson was greeted by the sight of John Kerr, Long’s fishing partner on the boat that day, grinning back at him from the cover of Sports Afield, holding up Jed’s completely uncredited personal best bass, apparently now caught on a lure Long was promoting. 

Dottie

Later that year, Long caught a 20 lb. 12 oz. fish from Dixon with a distinctive black dot near her gill cover. Not only did “Dottie,” as she came to be known, rattle the record and cement Long’s reputation, it shook the boys up to redouble their efforts. 

Jed had his shot at the title in May 2003. According to his widely accepted account, he fairly hooked and landed a bass that weighed 23 lbs. when put on an unofficial hand-held scale minutes after capture. To claim the record however, meant putting her in a live-well to wait for an official from California Game and Fish to bring a certified scale. It took three hours for them to arrive and either because of the stress of being captured or a wonky initial weighing, the official number came back at 21 lbs. 11.2oz., not much more than half-a-pound shy of immortality, but still the fifth heaviest bass ever landed. 

When it was reported that Jed’s fish also had a black dot on its gill cover and was almost certainly the same fish Long had captured, the news if anything intensified interest in the record chase: now there was a known contender. Somewhere in the canyons of Manhattan an executive with giant insurance conglomerate AIG, which had taken over the underwriting of the BBRC’s $8 million bounty from Lloyds, also formed a round opinion of Dottie’s growing appetite and girth: entirely too ever-expanding for prudent insurance. The company tripled the club’s premiums for the big bass competition, putting it out of business. 

The loss of the BBRC’s huge prize money did little to slow the trio’s determination: they were gut-hooked now and going to see this quest through to its end, whatever that might be. The trio knew with some certainty where the big girl liked to hang out in those crucial weeks around the spawn when she would be at her heaviest: it seemed inevitable that the next of the three to land the fish would make history. 

Mac 

Two years later Mac Weakley spotted the giant fish guarding a nest of newly hatched bass fry. Targeting a single fish in this way in a clearwater reservoir requires a lot of variables to click into place, like the tumblers on a lock aligning. It was a rare chance with no competing anglers around or lesser sized bass to dash in and ruin the presentation, and he went for it. He pitched a white jig straight into the giant’s territory and began dancing the lure around in the hope the big girl’s maternal aggression would cause her to charge out and whack the intruder. 

It looked like Weakley had finally cracked the code when a thud came up the line and he found himself attached to such a ponderous weight he knew it could only be Dottie. The big girl smashed the record by nearly three pounds that day, un-officially weighing in at a colossal 25 lbs. 1oz., plenty of cushion to claim the official title even if witnesses and official scales took hours to arrive. There was a catch of course, or rather a lack of a catch, because Dottie was foul hooked outside the mouth making it impossible to tell whether she had been initially legally deceived or accidentally snagged, which sometimes happens when bed fishing. Weakley declined to move forward with a record claim despite potentially being able to argue a case.

To the heartbreak of many record-chasers around the world but not without some sense of relief for those most addicted to her pursuit, Dottie avoided any further capture and was found dead of natural causes in the margins of Dixon in 2008. If a fish can be famous, she achieved that mantle and her passing was widely reported by fishing media and many mainstream news outlets, including ESPN.

Record-producing waters often crest in their potential after a period of years and for reasons not wholly understood by fishery scientists, rarely re-gain that peak. This has certainly been the case in California, where after a period of complete pre-eminence and a sense that breaking the record was inevitable, the state’s big bass potential seems to have lost its kinetic energy like a promising surf that breaks too early. A twenty-pound bass has not been landed in California since Weakley’s near miss.

Two Photos

At the peak of California forcing Perry’s record into the shade of historical myth, the old angler managed to push back in a spectacular way. Perry died in a small engine plane crash in 1974 (he was a keen amateur pilot in his later years), but before his death he’d recalled that only two photos were taken of his catch, and only one of those a clear image. In 2005, a relative of Perry’s was going through some old accumulated papers when they found a weathered photograph of a man holding up a gigantic bass next to a young boy. Though the man isn’t Perry, everything else about the photo appears legitimate: historical photos and accounts of the Helena post office seem to fit with the background of scrubby grass and palms, the clothing of the man and boy fit the era, and the bass is colossal. Held vertically just in front of the three- or four-year old boy, it looks like his head could fit inside its mouth; its girth at the widest point looks about the same as the child’s.

But you have to be careful with fishing photos. In 2016 on the 81st anniversary of Perry’s record, an anonymous sender claiming to be related to the Page family emailed journalist and bass record historian Bill Babb what appeared to be the world’s first photo of Perry with the record bass. Babb at one time was the outdoors editor for The Augusta Chronicle and was well used to chasing down leads. He confirmed that the man in the photo was very likely Perry but everything else about the image appears faked. When Babb tried to follow-up and ask for more details, the sender had deactivated their email account. 

Ironically, for the world’s most popular style of fishing, the record story then swings to a place where bass are officially reviled as an invasive species and its devotees are considered a rough and ill-mannered minority.

Japan – “A Dark Fishing”

Like many other stories of non-native species introduction, bass came to Japan for no other reason than someone missed having them around. According to several reports, that someone was international businessman Akabishi Tetsuma who’d enjoyed fishing for the species in the US and wanted to see how they’d fare in his home waters of Ashino Lake near Tokyo. The first introduction was in 1925 but it wasn’t until Americans began occupying the country in the wake of WWII that the fish began to ascend in popularity and spread to other lakes. The sight of those occupying GI’s high-fiving each other over the capture of an equally invasive creature, we might project, set the stage for a deep Japanese ambivalence to bass and bass anglers that still exists today. 

While a hardcore of Japanese anglers are obsessive bass chasers and support a cultish devotion to new lures, techniques and tackle, the establishment takes a different line. In an interview in The Los Angeles Times a few years ago, Minoru Sato, the head of Japan’s National Federation of Fisheries Cooperative Association was quoted as saying:

“Japanese bass fishing is a ‘dark fishing’ and cannot be called a sport. Bass anglers are very bad-mannered – parking a car on a plowed field, interrupting the traffic, cutting off lures if gotten caught in fishing nets. It is a lawless situation regarding a foreign fish.”

Despite, or maybe because of its American outlaw standing, Japanese bass fishing is especially appealing to punkish young non-conformists. And one such outsider was about to set the bass fishing world on its ear.

Japan – Lake Biwa

On July 2, 2009 Manabu Kurita, a 32-year-old fishing guide cast a live bait into Lake Biwa, Japan’s largest freshwater lake, and waited for what fate might bring. Biwa is known for its beauty, clear water and mysterious depths, but Kurita was no casual fisherman out for a nice day on the water: he had seen and caught huge bass from the lake; his tackle and location were carefully selected, and he knew he was fishing a world class lake coming into the peak of its productivity for big fish. 

Like the California biologists who inadvertently created a trout-induced surge in trophy bass many thousands of miles away, fishery managers at Biwa also played an unwitting role in the next chapter of the bass story, though for quite different purposes. Around the turn of the millennium they began to aggressively cull bass from the lake in support of native fish stocks. This was very effective in thinning out the sheer numbers of smaller bass, but it left a proportionally bigger buffet for the still numerous survivors, which began to pack-on weight.

The fishing gods came calling for Kurita that day when his bait was engulfed by a bass weighing 22 lbs. 4.97 oz., just a couple of minnow mouthfuls heavier than Perry’s then 77-year-old record of 22 lbs. 4oz. 

Kurita was well aware of the significance of the catch and took all the necessary steps to officially claim the All-Tackle World Record, including official weighing, multiple photographs and measurements, and witness affidavits. He passed a polygraph test administered by the International Game Fishing Association (IGFA), the keepers of the flame of international fishing records. 

A Final Kick with her Tale and She’s Free

Kurita’s magnificent fish unfortunately perished soon after he landed her. But there was to be one last twist in the story allowing Perry’s fish to continue living in the imagination of the world’s bass anglers. IGFA rules dictate that for fish weighing less than 25 lbs., a record is only broken if the challenger fish beats the old record by two clear ounces. American sports fans abhor the concept of a tie, but that has turned out to be the fate of the most American fishing record of them all: both bass are now listed as the official All-Tackle World Record, gold medal twins separated on the podium by less than an ounce.

For his part, Kurita seemed wholly unfazed by his record having an asterisk. A short while after the capture he predicted he would very likely break the record more decisively next time and that the world wouldn’t have to wait too long either, judging by the much larger fish he had begun to see in Biwa’s crystal-clear water circling his bait and lures.

More than a decade on from his prediction, no fish anywhere close to the record has been caught in Lake Biwa or anywhere else in the world. 

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Footnote: US author Monte Burke’s book Sowbelly (Dutton, 2005) is a fantastic and in-depth tale of the history of the bass record and many of the characters drawn to the quest. It was the source for much of the material in this article.