Dead River

this is precisely why I wish Georgia would start managing our lakes statewide for trophy bass like texas. we need a sharelunker program and certain lakes set aside for green fish. most of the major lakes have stripers and hybrids, and we won't stock pure florida strain fish either. the horizon doesn't look much better. texas has it going on! again, nice fish, big o. but if I were catching fish like that I'd stay home and watch the classic reruns on tv.

only reason I did that was because I didn't have a scale but we had weighed a fish with identical measures earlier that day before my coangler with the scale left, so it worked out just fine I'm going to say between 10-12 pounds.

I've only not weighed one fish of that class. looks 10 lbs to me... nice fish

awesome fish. what did she weigh?

awesome, I've never fished Guntersville. was thinking about going on a trip with rognie brown on chick sometime. want to catch some monsters..

yes, this is what this thread is all about! compare the dimensions of the two reigning world record bass and you take my meaning entirely.

unless productivity is really off the chain I think a bass has to get to the 25" mark to be a double digit, my first double digits were 26" long, this is not a total length or fork length measurement just the longest part of the tail open naturally. in cased where productivity is good you'll have fish like my 10-8 f1 which was a short fish with a total length of 24", meaning it's under 24" in comparison to how I measured my first double digits. You generally need 25x19 to make a double digit in my opinion unless of course you have great conditions and productivity.

here's another 5 lb + class fish caught from a small public lake choked with threadfin shad, notice how portly more shad lake bass, outgrowing their heads

here are a couple of fat bass that are not gravid, one was caught in October, one was caught after the spawn http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnQb2qKomPg notice the belly on this fish http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MedP9P1L4pw

and we're not even talking about growth immediately, we're talking about being full of forage, what about the February 10 lb 10 oz bass I posted that had what looked to be a 3/4 lb channel cat in its throat. and she hit my deep diver after that. a bass could gain a pound in a month easily, a bass could be a pound heavier at the end of a good day or gorging itself on shad or sunfish big bass could eat goldfish over 2 lbs and beyond with no problem. I digress

who said strain had anything to do with metabolism, I was talking purely about geography and your fish having a shorter growing season. speaking of external factors, when bass have more readily available easy meals they tend to be fatter than bass that have to work harder for food. a bass is an energy conservant predator that will maximize what it eats and minimize the effort it takes to get it. fyi, that lake that produced all the fish on this thread except one is inundated with stunted crappie. how can you not tell that many of those bass are fat and not all of them are gravid. a bass can carry weight in a lot of diff locations besides its belly, in the shoulders, around the tail and anal fin area, and of course in the belly. you can have a bass with a horse head, a 10 pound head and it can weigh 7 pounds, or you can have a 21" total length fish like mine that weighed 7 lbs, we're talking almost square fish here, it's about productivity. I once saw a photo of a 22.5" bass that weighed 11 lbs. I think your views are biased because you live/fish in a geographically limited area. that's just my opinion. if you can't see the distinction in the photos of the fish I have posted, I don't know what else I can do for you.

that is a very nice northern strain bass that he posted. I have never caught one, I've only caught our native fx intergrades and the f1 hybrids. I'm down to catch a pure florida strain at some point

n.b. in close to a month, combination of the prespawn feed up and the roe development.

if fish put on 10% of their body weight in roe prior to the spawn then for a 5 lber, 10% of 16 oz is 1.6 oz, 1.6oz x 5= 8 oz, that's half a pound of roe a 5 lber will put on, and just so you know, I don't buy that 10% figure across the board are you trying to tell me that a fish is not going to consume 8 oz of forage during the prespawn, I'm gonna have to side with the other guy from Georgia here. I posted these pictures to illustrate how portly these fish are during the prespawn. the three fish I caught last weekend are nowhere nearly as filled out as the fish I shared in photographs from the previous years. we had historically much milder winters both of those years and it's evident that the fish began feeding up earlier, you can look at them and tell that they are well nourished, those photos of me and the buddy were taken in late January of 2012. the proof is in the pudding, look at the bass I caught this winter in the OP, then look at the fish from years past, they are much, much heavier. the bass I caught this winter have similar lengths just not the girth and stockiness. maybe it's your location, but our bass have a longer growing season here and eat more, they have a higher metabolism as well

nice fish!

that's a nice fish but it looks 25" or so to me, your hand sort of takes away from it for me. here's my 26" tail open

I'm not saying 4 lbs, I'm just saying they can inflate. I've posted pictures of what my girls should be looking like going forward

biggest fish I've landed out of the lake, right at 7 lbs 21" (tail pinched total length) x 17" N.B. this fish was caught in mid October of 2013, so no eggs in site, how about that heavy algal stain, lot of fertilizer run off huh?

6 pounder from the prespawn last year

here is a 5 lb 2 oz fish from the prespawn last year. I cropped the fish's belly accidentally but yes it was extremely fat. look at the bass closely. that is not a 5 lb frame and head, it's morbidly engorged with forage and roe, it was weighed on a reliable handheld digital and fought like the dickens, below it is another fish that weighed 4 lb 6 oz, see what I mean?

that fish is not from the same lake, but you take my meaning. bass put on weight in different places, here are some healthier fish from the same lake I caught the three this past weekend. these fish were caught a couple of years ago

mainebass, you have to think out of the box, man.

Well fed post winter and pre spawn with roe on top of a full belly that 5-3 I caught is a 6 lber all day long

Post it in the body of a message. How did you measure it? Post hoc?