Teen hauls in record largemouth bass

Brent Frazee | McClatchy Newspapers

5/7/2008 - 5/8/08

When Tyson Hallam, 14, entered a kids fishing derby Saturday, he was just another young fisherman with big dreams.

By the end of the day, he was the talk of the Kansas fishing world.

Fishing from a boat on a private strip pit in Cherokee County, he caught an 11-pound, 12.8-ounce largemouth bass — the biggest ever recorded in Kansas.

His catch could erase a mark that has been on the books for 31 years — and by the narrowest of margins. The bass caught by Kenneth Bingham of Topeka in 1977 on a Jefferson County farm pond weighed only eight-tenths of an ounce less.

Hallam's catch will have to go through a mandatory waiting period before it becomes official. But representatives of the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks see little preliminary indications that the fish won't be approved.

"Some fishermen spend their whole life trying to catch an 8- or 9-pound bass," said Hallam, who lives in Scammon, Kan. "Then I come along and have something like this happen to me.

"This is crazy. I was just lucky."

Hallam's bass came at the end of the day when he was making one of his last casts. He had already caught a bass that he estimated at 5 or 6 pounds and he felt good about his chances in the derby. When he cast a jig and pig to a patch of brush off a point, he felt his line stop. And he assumed that he was hung up.

But when the line started to move, he knew he had something big.

"When I got a look at that fish, I couldn't believe it," he said. "I knew that strip pit had some big bass, but I didn't think it had anything like this."

His father, Terry Hallam, also was shocked.

"When I came over and saw that bass, I about had a heart attack," he said.

The monstrous bass measured 28 inches in length and 19 1/8 inches in girth. The Hallams had the fish weighed on a certified scale and certified by a representative of Wildlife and Parks.