Watch: Fifth Grader Skips School to Catch 13-Pound Largemouth Bass
Stetson Davis, 11, missed a day of class to go on a last-minute fishing trip with his father. It paid off big-time
Last week, an 11-year-old angler caught a largemouth bass that broke a junior-class record on a Texas lake known for lunkers, and his dad caught it all on video. Stetson Davis is a 5th grader in Tuttle, Oklahoma. His father Brodey pulled him out of class for the last-minute fishing trip.
“We skipped school,” explains Brodey. “I had a little break in work and Stetson starts baseball season this weekend. We had a short window. I’d been wanting to take him down to Lake J B Thomas to potentially get his first double-digit bass, so we made it happen.”
The father-son duo left Oklahoma the night of Tuesday, March 5. They arrived in Snyder, Texas at midnight. “We woke up pretty early the next morning and were the second boat on the lake,” Stetson tells Field & Stream. “We could not get on one for a while.”
Brodey and Stetson were using a livescope fish finder to target big bass. The water clarity was quite low, and despite using a 6-inch swimbait, the bite was slow. At around 9:20 a.m., the duo encountered a good-sized mark on the fishfinder.
“I cast at her 15 or 20 times,” says Stetson. “I was about to give up because I thought the fish was flat out blind.”
It’s a good thing he didn’t; the fish finally bit and put up a fierce but short fight. It was a giant. “I’ll never forget my dad’s face when he saw the fish go to the surface and do a little head shake,” says Stetson. “He looked at me like he’d seen a ghost.”
Brodey netted his son’s fish. “I was like ‘Holy crap!’’ recalls Stetson. He immediately knew it was the biggest fish he’d ever caught. Before this, his personal record was an 8.8-pounder. Stetson soon learned he’d caught not just a double-digit pound fish, but a 13.31-pound behemoth.
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Stetson’s father Brodey is no stranger to catching big fish, either; he caught a 17-pounder at O.H. Ivey in 2022. So he knew to call the Toyota ShareLunker Program—a Texas Parks & Wildlife initiative that collects big angler-caught bass and uses them for a trophy spawning program. The program dispatched a crew to the lake to pick up the fish, which would go down as ShareLunker Legacy Class fish—as well as the Lake J B Thomas Junior Angler Record. “My goal now is to try to get another Junior Lake Record,” says Stetson.
