Right around dawn on March 30, Brad Tucker and Ted Taylor launched Tucker’s Phoenix bass boat onto Lake O.H. Ivie. The pair of veteran anglers had driven from their homes near Dallas to the 20,000-acre reservoir east of San Angelo because of Ivie’s reputation as one of the best trophy bass lakes in Texas. Now they were looking for bass weighing 10 pounds or better using forward-facing sonar.
“I’d never caught a 10 pounder, and Brad wanted to catch a bigger bass than his personal best teener,” Taylor tells Outdoor Life. “We found some big bass on Ivie when we started fishing Monday. But the big ones wouldn’t hit. I think we caught about 8 bass. The biggest was a 6.5-pounder.”
The next day the two fishermen hit the lake again. But this time they tried a different area along the northern part of the reservoir, Taylor says. The water temperature was 64 degrees, and pre-spawn bass were holding deep near creek edges. They located some big bass but none of them would hit a lure until the evening.
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“We spotted [one bass] on sonar about a foot off bottom above some rocks,” says Taylor, a 49-year-old defense contractor from Allen. “I made a cast to her with a soft plastic 5.5-inch watermelon colored lure [that looked] like a bluegill.”
Taylor watched on sonar as his lure dropped toward the bass. It was taken down with a 3/8-ounce sinker pegged to the hook, which was rigged weedless, Texas style, inside the bait.
“Brad and I both saw her tip down to take my lure, and that’s when we realized how huge she was,” Taylor recalls. “I felt line tension, set the hook, but a smaller male bass had rushed in and taken my lure instead of the big fish.”
Taylor quickly brought the 2-pound bass to the boat and released it. Tucker then tried another cast to the fish that they still could see on sonar. The big bass ignored Tucker’s lure. So, Taylor cast to the fish. Then he felt tension again.
“It just felt heavy and I set the hook,” Taylor says. “I didn’t know it was a fish at first, thinking it might be a snag – until I felt the pulsing of her tail. Then I knew it was a giant of a bass.”
He leaned on the bass with all his strength because the area where the fish was hooked was a nightmare of flooded timber, rocks, and woody snags.
“I got her up as fast as I could to the boat and Brad scooped her up in our landing net. We got her out of the net and were shocked at her size. Brad said right away that it was a ‘teener.’ On our Bubba boat scale, she weighed 14 pounds.”
The anglers knew right away that it was a Legacy Class ShareLunker. They called Natalie Goldstrohm, the Texas ShareLunker program coordinator, who sent out a state fisheries team to weigh and measure Taylor’s bass. This would be the team’s last mission of the season, since the ShareLunker program only accepts entries during spawning season, which runs from Jan. 1 to March 31.
The fishermen ran back to the ramp and loaded the boat onto a trailer with the bass still in the livewell. They drove to nearby Elm Creek Marina, which opened their store to place Taylor’s fish in a large, aerated bait tank until the state ShareLunker fisheries crew arrived to officially weigh and measure the bass.
When the ShareLunker team arrived, they weighed Taylor’s bass on certified scales at 14.22-pounds. The fish had a 24.5-inch length and an incredible 22.5-inch girth.
“The girth on this bass was tremendous — almost as big as the fish’s length,” Taylor says.
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Usually, the ShareLunker team would take the trophy bass back to a state hatchery for spawning. But Goldstrohm says the holding tank was already full. So, biologists took samples and gave the live bass back to Taylor, who headed out with Tucker back onto O.H. Ivie.
“We used GPS to run right back to the spot where she was caught and released her there. She was in great shape, and she should spawn and produce plenty of fry that hopefully one day will grow as large as she is.”
This year’s ShareLunker season was a huge success by any measure. No less than 19 bass weighing 13 pounds or more were caught and donated by anglers across Texas. The heaviest bass of the 2026 season was a 16.04-pounder caught by Austin Miles at Purtis Creek State Park Lake. That fish ranks among the top 30 heaviest largemouth bass ever recorded in the program’s 40-year history.
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