World Record Largemouth Bass: Perry, Kurita and Dottie

The world record largemouth bass weighs 22 lb 4 oz (10.1 kg), and two fish share it: one caught from a Georgia oxbow in 1932 by a farm boy with a single lure, the other from a Japanese lake in 2009 by an angler who missed beating it by about an ounce. Between and around those two are the fish that did not count, the biggest of them a 25 lb 1 oz female from a small California reservoir that had a name, a following and a foul hook in her back. Below: the documented facts of each, the rules that decide what a record is, and why the next one, if it comes, will have to pass a genetic test.

Dottie weighed 25 lb 1 oz, more than any bass ever certified, and never counted: she was hooked in the back, not the mouth, and the rules do not bend for a famous fish.

George Perry, Montgomery Lake, 1932

On 2 June 1932, George Washington Perry, twenty years old and farming outside Helena, Georgia, took a day off from the fields because the rain had made ploughing impossible and went fishing with his friend Jack Page on Montgomery Lake, an oxbow of the Ocmulgee River. They had one lure between them, a Creek Chub Fintail Shiner, and they took turns sculling the boat. The fish that took it was measured at a general store in Helena, 32½ in (83 cm) long with a girth of 28½ in (72 cm), and weighed on the certified scales at the post office at 22 lb 4 oz; the figures were recorded and notarised. Perry entered it in Field & Stream’s annual big-fish contest and won first prize, a shotgun, shells and clothing worth $75 in all. Then his mother fried one side of it for dinner for the family of six, and the other side the next night. Field & Stream recognised the fish as the world record in 1934; the magazine later lost Perry’s entry papers, and no photograph of the fish was submitted, which is the root of every doubt since. A photograph of a man and a boy holding a big bass outside Helena’s post office surfaced in 2005, sent to the historian Bill Baab by a descendant of Perry’s companion; Baab, who wrote the book on the catch, was not sure the fish in it was a 22-pounder. Sceptics have pointed at the four-pound gap between Perry’s fish and Georgia’s next-largest bass and even suggested a striped bass. None of that has moved the record. Perry died in 1974 when his plane hit a mountain near Birmingham, Alabama.

Manabu Kurita, Lake Biwa, 2009

On 2 July 2009 Manabu Kurita caught a largemouth of 22 lb 4.97 oz (10.12 kg) at Lake Biwa, Japan’s largest lake, where American largemouth were introduced in the 1920s and grew, on a diet of native fish, to sizes the United States rarely sees. The IGFA certified the fish in January 2010 as a tie rather than a new record, because its rules are exact: “to replace a record for a fish weighing less than 11.33 kilograms (25 pounds), the replacement must weigh at least 56.69 grams (2 ounces) more”, and a fish that matches or exceeds the old weight by less than that is a tie. Kurita’s bass was about an ounce short. The IGFA also investigated whether he had fished legally in a restricted area, and cleared him. Two names have stood on the line since.

Dottie, Lake Dixon, 2001 to 2008

The biggest largemouth ever put on a scale never held the record. In the small, clear, trout-stocked reservoirs of San Diego County, a group of anglers spent the early 2000s hunting one fish, a female recognisable by a black dot on her right gill plate: Dottie. Mike Long caught her at 20 lb 12 oz in 2001; Jed Dickerson caught her at 21 lb 11 oz in May 2003; and on 19 March 2006 Mac Weakley, fishing a jig he could barely see in the murk, set the hook on a flash and landed her at 25 lb 1 oz (11.4 kg), almost three pounds over the record. She was hooked in the back. The IGFA rules disqualify a fish that is intentionally foul-hooked and require a fair-hooked fish for a record; Weakley weighed her, photographed her and released her rather than submit an application that would have been refused and, he said, doubted forever. In early 2008 Dixon Lake staff found her floating, dead of age. Her weights across seven years are the best growth record any wild largemouth has.

The list

Two search-box questions have plain answers here. “Do 30-pound bass exist?” Nothing near it has ever been weighed; the largest verified largemouth is Dottie at 25 lb 1 oz, and claims of 30 and 50 lb bass are stories. “Has there ever been a 20-pound bass?” Yes: a handful, almost all from Southern California’s trout-stocked reservoirs and Lake Biwa, and a 20-pounder is rarer than a 10-pounder by a very long way. Florida’s TrophyCatch programme, which has verified more than 16,000 bass of 8 lb or heavier since 2012, has approved 168 of 13 lb or more and none of 20.

What a record needs

The IGFA’s rules are the standard every state and magazine follows. The fish must be caught on rod and reel by one angler, fair-hooked, on tackle that meets the rules; it must be weighed on scales “certified for accuracy by government agencies or other qualified and accredited organizations within the past 12 months”, with disinterested witnesses “whenever possible”; it must beat the standing record by 2 oz under 25 lb, or by half of one percent above that; and it must be identified to species. That last clause acquired teeth in June 2024. After the 2022 genomic revision separated the Florida bass, Micropterus salmoides, from the largemouth, now M. nigricans, the IGFA created new record categories and ruled that any new all-tackle largemouth record must be genetically verified, because the biggest bass in Florida, California and Japan are Florida bass or hybrids. The fish most likely to beat Perry is therefore not, by the new rules, a largemouth at all.

Where the next one lives

The candidates are the same waters that produced the list: Southern California’s small, clear reservoirs where Florida-strain bass grow fat on stocked trout, Lake Biwa, and Texas’s trophy lakes, where the state’s ShareLunker programme collects and breeds bass over 13 lb. Whether any of them holds a fair-hooked, genetically pure largemouth over 22 lb 6 oz is the question the record has asked for ninety years. The largemouth bass page has the growth and age data behind the odds, and the bass hub the season pattern for the anglers who keep trying.