On September 15, a Montana angler caught what could have been a world-record smallmouth bass—if he’d only used an official IGFA measuring board before releasing it. Daniel Caricaburu-Lundin caught the lunker bass in an Idaho lake using a custom glide bait he made himself.
He was fishing the 6-inch glide bait through underwater structure after noticing two giant bass on his fish finder. “This point is about 5-to-10-feet deep, but it quickly drops off to 100 feet or more,” the angler tells Field & Stream. “They’ll sit on the edge of it and just blow up schools of kokanee in the deeper water. It’s super cool to watch on the Livescope.”
His first cast to the point with a swimbait brought one of the big bass out of the structure, but it wouldn’t commit. “I could see other fish moving underneath it,” he says, “so I fired off the glide bait in that same spot. I have it set up with weight so I can sink it down to the right depth before retrieving it.”
The same fish came back for another look at the glide bait. “Then a bigger bass came flying up from underneath and grabbed it,” he says. “As soon as I set the hook I was like, Oh my God, what is this? It felt like dead weight, until it started fighting.”
Lundin had recently rigged his glide baits with smaller size-4 treble hooks, and he thought the giant bass might bend the hook straight while he was fighting it. “He jumped out of the water completely, and my rod was just buried,” he says. “There’s no controlling a smallmouth like that. I backed the drag way down and played it really slow until I could see that it wasn’t fowl hooked. It was just ridiculously big.”
While fighting it, he had to steer the fish away from a big root ball nearby. Then it got hung up in his shallow-water anchor pole by the boat. “I could hear the line screeching against the pole,” he says. “I thought for sure it would snap.”
After a chaotic fight, he managed to untangle the line from the anchor pole and brought the bass to his net. “As soon as it went into the net, the bait fell right out of its mouth,” he says. “I couldn’t believe the weight of it when I lifted the net. I’ve never seen a smallmouth that size before.”
At 8 pounds, 6 ounces, the smallmouth is Lundin’s personal best. But its length—nearly 23 inches from the nose to the fork of the tail—was the real kicker. “I did all the measurements with a non-IGFA board, even though I had an IGFA-certified measuring board in the boat, because I had no idea the fish was even approaching world-record length,” says Lundin, who already has a world-length-record tiger muskie to his name. “Then I got home and found out the standing record is over an inch smaller.”
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The current IGFA record books show a six-way tie for the All Tackle (Length) World Record in the smallmouth category at 53 centimeters or 20.86-inches long, meaning Lundin’s fish would have easily taken the top spot if measured on a certified scale. The overall All Tackle World Record for the species weighed a whopping 11 pounds, 15 ounces, but its length isn’t listed in the record books. Angler David Hayes caught that fish in Tennessee in 1955.
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