I made two trips to Lake Fork this week, Monday and yesterday (Wednesday). As windy as Texas tends to be this time of year, I try to pick the least windy days to go. This week was no exception. It was windy all week, but Monday and yesterday were less so than the rest of the week, so I fished both of those days. Monday morning was very windy, but the wind slowly decreased all day, and by late afternoon, there was very little wind. Yesterday was just the opposite, with light winds in the morning, but fierce winds by afternoon. I caught 13 bass Monday, The largest weighed 4.51 pounds.

This 4.51 pound bass was Monday’s biggest.

By late yesterday afternoon, I’d caught a couple of bass that were just under 4 pounds, and a bunch of 2 and 3 pounders, and nothing bigger. I’ve mentioned before that by these later stages of the spawn, I tend to catch smaller fish. Most of the truly giant late spawners tend to use beds too deep to see or sight fish for, and the few who do spawn shallower are very wary, and will typically leave their bed when a bait is cast to it, and not return until there is no longer a boat nearby. But with all its big fish, magic can happen on any day at Lake Fork, and it did at just after 4:00 yesterday afternoon.

I was fishing in one of my favorite coves on the lake, one that can be especially good in the late afternoon. I’d just fished the best bank in this cove, and saw 4 large bass as I worked down it. Two were just swimming around shallow and the other two would leave the bed and not come back as soon as I put a bait on it. Nothing new there. But after fishing the rest of the cove, I decided to look at this bank again. It’s protected from most wind, and usually dead calm, but yesterday’s wind was so fierce when I first fished it that there were ripples on the water there, and I thought I might have missed seeing some smaller fish on it. And the wind had eased just a bit, so I tried the bank again. Sure enough, I spotted and caught a couple of smaller bedding bass. Three of the four larger bass were still exhibiting the same uncatchable behavior they’d shown earlier.

But the largest of them acted differently this time. When I cast my bait onto her bed, she immediately left it, but rather than staying out in the deeper water, she turned around after just a few seconds and swam back to the bed. The next time I cast, she did the same thing. After the third time of this, I had my bait already on the bed before she returned, and just as she swam back onto the bed, I twitched the bait. She immediately engulfed it, and the fight was on. There were a few tense seconds as she took off and pulled out a lot of line against my reel’s drag, while my line was still around a clump of grass near the bed. But I managed to free the line from the grass without losing her, and shortly afterward, was weighing the largest bass I’ve caught in very many years, a 9.65 pound beauty.

At 4:12 yesterday afternoon, I caught this 9.65 pound Lake Fork beauty.

I ended up with 17 bass for the day. As I mentioned earlier, most were 2 or 3 pounders. But an almost 10 pound bass will give me a special memory to keep for as long as my memory continues to work. Not surprisingly, I’m excited about my next Lake Fork trip. We’ll see what next week brings.