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MONTICELLO — A bass angling friend told Rod Martinez in late February that the fish were really biting at Lake Monticello. Martinez headed that way, eager to see what he might land.
“I thought I might go catch a big fish,” he said.
He caught five fish on five consecutive casts, all on a jig, which convinced him to stick with that bait all day. One fish among 14 total catches measured 7.1 pounds, a couple were 4-pounders. Nothing weighed less than 2 pounds, and he said his fishing buddy also caught a 5-pounder.
Then came the fish that made the trip truly worthwhile. Around 1:40 p.m., Martinez had a really big one take hold of his jig. The bass fought well and came to the surface two or three times, he recalled. Neither he nor buddy Dave Lewis had a net handy, but Martinez safely got the massive fish into the boat. His own scale, topping 10 pounds, told him that a call to the Arkansas Legacy Lunker hotline was in order.
Will Lancett, the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission’s coordinator of the Arkansas Legacy Lunker program, was already picking up Legacy Lunker No. 9 from Lower White Oak Lake. Local fisheries biologists Ryan Mozisek and Levi Olhausen met up with Martinez at the ramp and provided fish care until Lancett could arrive to officially weigh the fish to see if it would qualify for the program.
Lancett’s official scale measured Martinez’s fish at 10.22 pounds, and then it was headed to the Joe Hogan State Fish Hatchery in Lonoke to join eight other donated lunkers, where they will be part of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission program to breed more potential big bass for Arkansas lakes.
The first Game and Fish Legacy Lunker season opened Jan. 1 and runs until March 31. All anglers donating their fish between those dates receive a reproduction mount from Harper’s Pure Country Taxidermy. They also are entered into a drawing for a 21-foot Xpress boat courtesy of Xpress Boats of Hot Springs.
Game and Fish renovated the lake, with permission of the city of Monticello which owns the lake, before refilling began. Stocking forage fish began in 2021. Ever since harvest resumed Feb. 1, anglers have been turning out.
Bass harvest was implemented to help remove some of the smaller fish so the larger ones can grow even more. Mozisek said that based on what he’s seen through electrofishing sampling and in his own fishing, the growth of bass there has been startling, especially considering the stocking of sport fish began just three years ago.
“The bass in Lake Monticello appear to be growing almost twice as much compared to other lakes around the state. We have been monitoring their growth via length at age, and it is far more impressive than most Arkansas fisheries,” he said. “March of 2024, we had 6½-pound bass that were 2½ years old. You usually don’t see a 6½-pound bass unless it’s anywhere from 5 to 8 years old in Arkansas.”
Typically, bass on average gain about a pound a year. “We’re getting 2 or more pounds a year on these fish,” he said. “You can see that in fishing. When I first started out there, all you caught were 3-pound fish. By the end of the year, they were 4 pounds. Then the next spring they were 5½ pounds.”
The driving factors for growth, he said, are a large amount of vegetation that was allowed to grow on the lake bed during renovation, lots of nutrients now available in the water, and lots of food for fewer bass than normal for a lake this size.
