Game Over 
Bass-O-Matic
How a radical plan for breeding huge fish transformed one of the most popular sports in Texas.
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Lutz-Carrillo’s job supports the entire Inland Fisheries Division of the TPWD, but within the ShareLunker program his marching orders originate from a project called Operation World Record. OWR was launched in 2001. Its single intention is to selectively breed a fish in Texas bigger than the 22-pound 4-ounce bass caught in Montgomery Lake, in Georgia, in 1932. At the same time, through genetic monitoring, it aims to prevent inbreeding, which could result in deleterious recessive traits in the fish population. “They want to know,” he said, “Has this particular fish been caught as a ShareLunker before? Or is this fish an offspring of a previous ShareLunker?”
The process begins strangely, with a fin segment the size of a chad placed in a test tube. Lutz-Carrillo eliminates everything but the DNA via a multistep process involving submerging the fin segment in various solutions, heating it, cooling it, and spinning it in a centrifuge that pulls on the test tube sample with 13,400 times the force of gravity. Fully prepared, the sample looks like plain water, with no visible sign of the fin. Lutz-Carrillo pours the liquid from the test tube into a gene sequencer that uses an electric current to draw the DNA through a porous gel matrix with convoluted tunnels that lead to the bottom of the machine, where a laser registers the time it takes for each strand to complete the journey. The longer the DNA strand, the slower it is. From the strand-size numbers registered by the laser, Lutz-Carrillo gathers all kinds of information.
“If you’re a Florida largemouth bass, you’ll have a strand that’s x long,” he explained. “A northern is y long. A hybrid would have some x along with some y.” Through complicated calculations, he can identify the fish’s parents and pinpoint just how far back in Kemp’s experiment the family lineage was introduced to Texas.
With this information, Lutz-Carrillo can tailor the breeding program to produce the biggest, healthiest bass possible and, hopefully, the biggest, healthiest bass ever. But if you talk to enough fishermen, you’ll get the feeling that this world-record fish may already be out there, swimming in Texas waters, loitering under every boat and teasing anglers. Stories of “the big one that got away” frequently reach Campbell. His typical response is to smile and nod and say, “Yeah? I’ll believe it when I weigh it.” In recent years, two fish weighing about twenty pounds each floated up on the shores of Lake Fork. (One is rumored to have had scars indicating a close encounter with a hook.) But the true leviathan, the bass that breaks the world record, inevitably, consistently gets away, leaving anglers to their fishing tales.
Kelly Jordan, a former Lake Fork guide who is now a professional fisherman, is a true believer in the probability of a world record in Texas. Jordan is a good-looking guy in his thirties, with yellow hair and perfectly straight white teeth. Like most professional anglers, his face is sunburned a deep shade of red except for the area covered by his sunglasses. “I was night fishing in August,” he told me. “I think the year was ’94. I set the hook and the fish didn’t even move. A bell went off in my head like, ‘Oh, my God.’ It was a huge fish. This fish broke my rod, locked up my reel, and broke my line—all in about five seconds. No, maybe not even five seconds. Three seconds. People said, ‘Oh, you hooked a big catfish.’ Well, I’ve caught a lot of big catfish. Catfish don’t do what that fish did. So I said, ‘Well, it was either the world record or it was the only blue marlin in Lake Fork.’” He sighed. “I had nightmares about that fish,” he said. “It sounds weird, but a lot of people who had similar experiences say, ‘If I could just know how big that fish was, I’d feel better.’ That’s how I felt.”
The fruits of the ShareLunker program were on display this spring at the second annual Toyota Texas Bass Classic, a tournament held on Lake Fork from April 18 to April 20. There are other great bass lakes in Texas: the Amistad Reservoir, for example, or the International Falcon Reservoir. But more than half of the bass submitted into the ShareLunker program come from Lake Fork. The current state record—18.18 pounds, caught in 1992—came from Lake Fork.
Because Lake Fork bass are protected by the most restrictive limits in Texas, the Classic differs from the state’s other bass tournaments, where anglers go fishing solo and return for a weigh-in with fish in tow. At the Classic, anglers are set up in teams of four, with a pair going out onto the water in the morning and a pair going out in the afternoon. The team that comes back with the most combined pounds of bass wins, and the members split $250,000, with lesser amounts paid to the other top slots.
This year, in order to abide by the lake’s restrictive catch-and-release rules, each boat was assigned a judge who would ride along and weigh every fish on the spot before it was released. Only one fish longer than 24 inches would be hauled to the stage per team for weigh-in. This setup was an experiment in the amount of secondhand, two-dimensional drama a crowd would tolerate. The multitudes onshore would watch most of the activity via television crews that followed the anglers in camera boats, and the results would be broadcast on the JumboTron, with the highlights airing on CBS later in the spring.
On the first day of the tournament, at about 6:45 in the morning, the nearly full moon had disappeared and the sun was beginning to rise. Just offshore, the idling boats sported advertisements for sponsors like GrandeBass, Strike King, Megabass, and Yamaha. One boat publicized Eyes on Jesus Ministries, with a drawing of a pair of yellow eyes stretched about five feet across the side of the boat, staring disconcertingly over the water. The anglers were NASCAR-ized from neck to waist in patches touting various bass companies. Most of the top pros were present. Kevin VanDam, of Michigan, considered the best bass fisherman in the world, hands down. Terry Scroggins, of Florida, whose team won the inaugural Toyota Texas Bass Classic, in 2007. Alton Jones, of Waco, fresh from his win at the 2008 Bassmaster Classic—the Super Bowl of the sport. Takahiro Omori, who moved to Lake Fork from Tokyo in the nineties and won the 2004 Bassmaster Classic. The early crowd consisted mostly of press and families of the pros. After listening to a young local karaoke devotee sing the National Anthem, the pros gunned their boats over the water with enough velocity to push the tears from their squinting, watery eyes back toward their temples.
By mid-morning, the anglers on the water were standing in their boats, casting. Bass tend to swim up near shore and spawn in the spring. Experienced anglers will look for where the birds are feeding, how fast the wind is blowing, what kind of front is coming in, and adjust their baits and depths accordingly. Though these subtle displays of fishing prowess were difficult to perceive from the live JumboTron feed, Gary Klein, a veteran pro, told me that anyone who couldn’t appreciate a pro’s level of expertise—anyone, for instance, who might venture that the whole spectacle was about as exciting as watching a stranger do laundry—clearly didn’t understand a thing about fishing.
“Hunting and fishing are sports,” he said. “All these others—basketball and football—are games. What other sport lasts ten hours a day for three to five days? We don’t step into an arena and two to three hours later it’s over. I’m trying to catch something I can’t even see.”
As if to tempt onlookers with the promise of giant fish lurking just out of sight, the Classic had erected displays of previous monsters. I wandered over to a tent that exhibited replicas of bass that had held the state record over the years. Eternally posed with their shellacked bodies curved to simulate motion, their mouths were open wide enough to fit the head of a little boy who pointed and gasped at each. A local had caught a twelve-pound bass in the nearby cove and dropped it in a semitruck-size aquarium display tank used for lure demonstrations. Invariably, throughout the rest of the weekend, people kept pulling out their camera phones and snapping pictures of the twelve-pounder. On the stage, an announcer hyped “B-b-b-big bass!” while the speakers blared “Who Let the Dogs Out?” The crowd, wearing T-shirts that said things like “Born to fish, forced to work” and “Kiss my grits,” whooped and stood on their feet as the JumboTron showed close-ups of fish amplified many times their actual size.
On Saturday afternoon, David Campbell stopped by to check the lunker activity. He huddled with about a dozen TPWD staffers under a tent. Because of water temperatures and weather changes, the fish were not near the shore, as everyone had hoped. They were scattered in water anywhere from one foot to thirty feet deep. No one was catching anything over eleven pounds twelve ounces. Disappointed, a TPWD staffer said, “Bless the water, Dave.”
“If it worked that way,” he replied, “I’d have the world record by now.”
By Sunday, Kelly Jordan, the former Lake Fork guide, and his team had won the Classic with a total of 228 pounds of fish. But Campbell would miss Jordan’s victory speech. At eight thirty that morning, he had gotten a call from an angler at the International Falcon Reservoir, about 545 miles away, and hit the road to pick up the most recent acquisition to the ShareLunker program: a 14.25-pounder. He arrived back in Athens at one a.m. the following day. After rolling the new entry into the ICU and taking its measurements, he placed it in a tank. “This is number 454,” he said, marking up his paperwork. That it was eight pounds short of the world record didn’t seem to bother him in the least. It was still a big fish.
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