March 16 was the last day of tournament fishing at a Major League Fishing event on Lake Hartwell. Angler Chad Mrazek was fishing alone, easing along the mouth of a feeder creek and looking for pre-spawn bass.
“It was about mid-day, and a tourney camera boat had just left me when the fish started to turn on with warming water temperatures,” the 24-year-old tournament fisherman from Montgomery, Texas, tells Outdoor Life. “I was using a heavy-weight drop-shot rig, fishing very slow and deliberate in about 18 feet of water. The fish just started taking my 6th Sense Bamboosa plastic worm.”
In the next hour or so, Mrazek caught four bass: three spotted bass and a chunky largemouth. He used live scope to find fish tight to the bottom. He located several fish and eased close to finesse them with a drop-shot-rigged plastic worm. Mrazek used six-pound braid and a long, 20-foot six-pound fluorocarbon leader.
“The bite was very slow, as the water temperature was only 56 degrees,” Mrazek says. “I had to keep the lure in front of their nose for a white to get a bite, and finally one of those three marks on my sonar to hit.
“It was a crushing strike, almost like a big catfish. That’s the way spotted bass are, like a freight train. Largemouths that day were very lethargic – you’d barely feel a bite. So, I knew it was a good bass by the way it hit and dogged deep during the fight. He fought so hard that for a while, I thought it might have been a striped bass.”
With such light line and a supple rod, Mrazek took his time battling the bass. Hartwell is vodka clear, and anglers can see down deep.
“You kinda want to horse them to the surface when you see them, but with light line, you gotta fight that urge to horse them up,” says Mrazek, who learned the reservoir while fishing on the college team at Lander University. “I took my time with that fish, got him in the net, and put him in the live well.”
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The big spot rounded out Mrazek’s five-fish bag. He tried locating another school and fished for another 30 minutes, but eventually had to head back to the dock.
Back at the weigh-in site that afternoon. Mrazek’s big spotted bass weighed 6 pounds, 4 ounces, which is a new lake record, according to Georgia Outdoor News. His fish tops the previous Hartwell Lake record of 5 pounds, 6.08 ounces set in 2007 by Raulie Bleech.
Mrazek’s total bass weight on that final day was 19 pounds, 5 ounces, good enough for third place and $20,000 in winnings.
Mrazek, who is currently on the road fishing tournament circuits, says he’s thinking about having a replica mount made of his lake-record spotted bass, which is also the biggest spot he’s ever caught.
“I love that lake so much and consider it almost my home water because I fished it so often while in college,” Mrazek says. “A mount of that fish from the lake I so love would be pretty special.”
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