Last week, an 11-year-old angler caught a largemouth bass that broke the junior-class record in 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 a last-minute fishing trip.
“We skipped school,” Brodey explained. “I had a little time off from work and Stetson starts baseball season this weekend. We have a short window. I would love to get him to Lake JB Thomas to potentially catch his first double-digit bass, so we did it.”
The father-son duo left Oklahoma on the night of Tuesday, March 5. They arrived in Snyder, Texas at midnight. “We woke up early the next morning and the second boat was on the lake,” Stetson said Field and Stream. “We won’t be together for a while.”
Brodey and Stetson use a livescope fish finder to target big bass. Water clarity was relatively low, and despite using a 6-inch swimbait, the bite was slow. Around 9:20 am, the two found a good mark on the fishfinder.
“I threw him 15 or 20 times,” Stetson said. “I almost gave up because I thought the fish was blind.”
Fortunately he didn’t; the fish finally bit and put up a fierce but brief fight. It is a giant. “I’ll never forget the look on my dad’s face when he saw the fish float to the surface and shake his head slightly,” Stetson said. “He looked at me as if he had seen a ghost.”
Brodey dangled his son’s fish. “I was like ‘Holy crap!'” Stetson recalled. He knew right away that it was the biggest fish he had ever caught. Before this, his personal record was an 8.8-pounder. Stetson soon learned that he had 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 in OH Ivey in 2022. So he knew to call the Toyota ShareLunker Program—a Texas Parks & Wildlife initiative that collects large angler-caught bass and uses them for a trophy spawning program. The program sent a crew out to the lake to retrieve the fish, which would go down as the ShareLunker Legacy Class fish—as well as the Lake JB Thomas Junior Angler Record. “My goal now is to try to get another Junior Lake Record,” Stetson said.
