Anyone who likes a good ol’ fashioned big fish story is sure to love the tale behind the Lady Bird Lunker. There is no mention of forward-facing sonar or other high-tech devices in this deal. Just a friendly fisherman who plays the guitar and grew up shagging grasshoppers to use as bait for dunking in Hill Country stock tanks.
Fittingly, the story unfolded along the shores of Lake Bird Lake. Located near the heart of downtown Austin, the 468-acre reservoir may not seem like a good spot to catch a monster bass.
Willie Pipkin knew better
Pipkin is a husband, father and professional musician from nearby Dripping Springs who earns a living picking blues and country tunes at night inAustin-area pubs. Each spring, the 47-year-old angler grabs his fishing gear and spends the mornings walking the banks of the lake in hopes of catching a few bass.
“Fishing is the first thing I ever fell in love with — I’ve done it my whole life,” Pipkin said. “I work nights and my wife drops our daughter off at school each day. I’ll usually fish for a few hours during the mornings before I pick her up in the afternoons. I own a boat and occasionally fish at lakes Travis and Austin, but Lady Bird is where I spend the most time in winter and early spring. It’s pretty convenient.”
Sweet Spot
One of his favorite spots is a spring-fed stream that flows into the lake near Zilker Metropolitan Park, a local hub for all sorts of recreational activities. Pipkin says the warm water temperature in the creek is heavily influenced by a popular swimming hole upstream called the Barton Springs pool. The water is clear enough to see all sorts of fish finning around a considerable distance from shore.
Shift to the morning of February 4.
Pipkin had already caught several bass up to six pounds on his watermelon/red Zoom Fluke when he spotted what looked to be a much bigger bass about 20 yards from shore. The fish was suspended in the water column and acting aggressively towards bream, smaller bass and anything else that swam by.
Closer observation revealed a tannish piece of structure directly beneath the fish.
“I”m not sure if it is a chunk of a piece of concrete or a rock,” Pipkin said. “Whatever it is, I’m pretty sure it was a spawning bed of some sort. She was really territorial.”
Pipkin said he made repeated caststothebigbassforaboutthree hours before it finally grabbed the bait. The fish managed to spit the plastic, but not before the angler got a decent look at it.
“I could tell it would go 10 pounds pretty easy,” he said.
Hoping to get another shot at the big bass, the angler returned to the creek the following morning. The fish was sitting in the exact spot as the day before, but still reluctant to bite.
Pipkin said he cast repeatedly to the bass for nearly another three hours with a spinning rod before he felt tension on the 20-pound braided line. He set the hook and the epic battle was on.
“She made 3-4 hard runs, ripping drag like crazy,” Pipkin recalled. “I’ve even got a couple of good jumps out of the deal, but she never did clear the water. She was just too big.”
A Call for Help
Just how big? The digital scale Pipkin carried in his backpack read 14 pounds.
“I knew then I had a Share-Lunker, maybe even a new lake record if the scales were right,” he said. “I was pretty excited. I’ve been wanting to catch a ShareLunker for years.”
Interestingly, Pipkin’s first phone call wasn’t directed to the Toyota ShareLunker program headquarters in Athens. Instead, he contacted his good friend, Tim Fading, who showed up 20 minutes later with a breathable mesh bag he uses to keep fish alive in saltwater.
“I just stood in the water with the fish in my hand until Tim got there,” he said. “That bag worked great. We held the fish in the water for about 1 1/2 hours before TPWD got there to pick her up. She was in great shape.”
Legacy Lunker: 14.05 pounds
The official weight on Pipkin’s 27.75 inch bass is 14.05 pounds, easily topping the 13 pound Legacy Lunker threshold and crushing the former lake record set in 2015 by more than a half pound. Pipkin thinks the fish may have already spawned, because it appeared very skinny with no paunched belly to indicate its ovaries were full of eggs.
ShareLunker caretaker and Texas Freshwater Fisheries Center hatchery manager Donavan Patterson believes it is certainly a possibility but says it still too early to tell.
“We have had long, skinny fish spawn in the past, said Patterson. “The cool thing about bass is they are fractional spawners, so even if we missed the first “best” spawn, we may get a good second spawn out of her to the benefit of the program.”
Other Bank Monsters
It’s only logical to assume that at Pipkin’s 14 pounder might be some sort of bank fishing record, but it isn’t. Not by Texas standards, anyway.
The unofficial Texas record for bank-caught bass belongs to the late Troy Coates of Emory. Coates caught of 17.08 pounder at Lake Fork in February 1991. The bass currently ranks as the No. 6 heaviest Texas bass of all-time.
I spoke with Coates soon after he boated the fish 34 years ago. He told me he was sitting in a chair and casting a big craw worm along a creek channel swing within casting distance of the shore when the big bite came.
Coates’big bank bass topped the previous unofficial Texas shore bass record that was caught a year earlier by Jesse Runnels, Jr. of Dallas. Runnels’14.31 pounder was caught from the public fishing pier at the Lake Bob Sandlin Recreation Area. The fish still ranks as the lake record largemouth for Bob Sandlin.
Oneofthemostmemorable twists to Runnels’ story is what he did with it after he caught it. Runnels, who was crappie fishing with live shiners at the time, reportedly placed the big bass in a five-gallon bucket along with the rest of the fish he had caught that day.
Shortly thereafter, the angler took the big fish to a local marina to have it weighed before he cleaned it. There, Runnels was reportedly approached by a group of other anglers who offered to trade him several smaller fish in exchange for the big bass, which was still alive at the time.
Runnels accepted the offer and handed over the trophy bass, which was quickly placed in a minnow vat. The big fish survived the ordeal, entered in Toyota ShareLunker program and later released back into the lake.
A number of other big bass tales have been hatched on Texas fishing piers and shorelines in the past.
In 2005, Jon Babich of Lewisville caught a 13.63 pounder while fishing for crappie from the Lake Lewisville Fishing Barge.
Babich was fishing for crappie when he saw a huge bass rise from the depths to eat a small crappie he had tossed back into the water seconds earlier. The angler quickly pitched a soft plastic bait to the same spot and the big bass grabbed it.
Much can be learned from all of this. The most obvious lesson is you don’t always need to be fishing from a boat to catch a giant.
Willie Pipkin knows all about it.
Matt Williams is a freelance outdoors writer based in Nacogdoches, mattwillwrite4u@ yahoo.com.
