World Record Largemouth Bass: Perry, Kurita and Dottie

The world record largemouth bass weighs 22 lb 4 oz (10.1 kg). A farm boy with a single lure caught it in a Georgia oxbow in 1932, and a Japanese angler tied it at Lake Biwa in 2009, missing a new record by about an ounce. Since the IGFA split the Florida bass from the largemouth in 2024, the Japanese fish is listed as the all-tackle Florida bass record at the same weight, and the 1932 fish stands alone under largemouth. The biggest bass ever weighed is on neither line: a 25 lb 1 oz female from a small California reservoir, with a name, a following and a foul hook in her side.

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

How did George Perry catch the record in 1932?

On June 2, 1932, George Washington Perry was twenty years old and farming outside Helena, Georgia. Rain had made plowing impossible, so he took a day off from the fields. He 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.

As Bassmaster’s Ken Duke tells it, 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). It was weighed on the certified scales at the post office at 22 lb 4 oz, and the figures were recorded and notarized. 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 recognized the fish as the world record in 1934. The magazine later lost Perry’s entry papers, and no photograph of the fish was submitted. That is the root of every doubt since.

In 2006 a photograph turned up among the effects of a distant Perry relative: a man and a child with a huge bass, apparently in Helena. The man is not Perry; Bill Baab, who wrote the book on the catch, thinks he may be Jack Page. A second photo, emailed to Baab in 2013 by someone claiming kinship with Page, shows a young man who looks like Perry. Baab told the Georgia Outdoor News he doubts the fish in it is a 22-pounder, and the sender stopped answering. Skeptics have pointed at the four-pound gap between Perry’s fish and Georgia’s next-largest bass, and some have 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.

Why is Manabu Kurita’s 2009 bass only a tie?

On July 2, 2009, Manabu Kurita caught a largemouth of 22 lb 4.97 oz (10.12 kg) at Lake Biwa, Japan’s largest lake. Largemouth reached Japan in 1925 and were first found in Lake Biwa in 1974; in a lake that size they grew to weights the United States rarely sees. Kurita’s fish took a live bluegill.

The IGFA certified the fish in January 2010 as a tie rather than a new record, because its rules are exact. In its words, “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.” A fish that matches the old weight, or beats it 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; Kurita later passed an IGFA polygraph on the circumstances of the catch. Both names shared the line until 2024, when the IGFA moved Kurita’s fish to its new Florida bass category at the same 22 lb 4 oz; the largemouth line now reads Perry alone.

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Who was Dottie, the biggest bass that never counted?

The biggest largemouth ever put on a scale never held the record. San Diego County has small, clear reservoirs, and in the early 2000s a group of anglers there spent years hunting one fish. She was a female, recognizable by a black dot on her 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. In March 2006 Mac Weakley was sight-fishing for her with a white jig. He got her to react, worked her to the boat, and weighed her at 25 lb 1 oz (11.4 kg), almost three pounds over the record.

She was hooked in the side, outside the mouth. The IGFA rules list intentionally foul-hooking a fish as a disqualifying act, and a fish hooked outside the mouth invites exactly that question. Weakley had her photographed on the dock, released her, and chose not to apply because of the foul hook. In May 2008 an angler found her floating dead in Dixon Lake, down to 19 lb; the reports put it down to natural causes. Her weights across seven years are a growth record few wild largemouth can match.

The biggest largemouth on record

Do 30-pound bass exist? Nothing near it has ever been weighed. The largest largemouth ever weighed 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 reservoirs and Lake Biwa. A 20-pounder is rarer than a 10-pounder by a very long way. Florida’s TrophyCatch program had approved 17,166 bass of 8 lb or heavier by July 2026, 178 of them 13 lb or more, and not one of 20.

The IGFA’s line-class records hold three more California fish over 20 lb: Raymond Easley’s 21 lb 3 oz from Oak View in 1980, and Bob Crupi’s 21 lb and 22 lb from Castaic Lake in 1990 and 1991. The most recent 20-pounder in the IGFA book is Kurita’s tie of 2009.

What does a bass need to count as a record?

The IGFA’s rules are the standard every state and magazine follows. An all-tackle record has to clear five bars.

1. The catch. Rod and reel, one angler, a fish that was not intentionally foul-hooked, tackle that meets the rules.
2. The scale. It must be “certified for accuracy by government agencies or other qualified and accredited organizations within the past 12 months.”
3. The witnesses. Disinterested witnesses, “whenever possible.”
4. The margin. The fish must beat the standing record by 2 oz under 25 lb, or by half of one percent above that.
5. The species. The fish must be identified to species.

That last clause acquired teeth in June 2024. A 2022 genomic revision had separated the Florida bass, Micropterus salmoides, from the largemouth, now M. nigricans. The IGFA then created new record categories and ruled that any new all-tackle largemouth record must be genetically verified. The giants come from Florida-strain water: California began stocking Florida bass in 1959, Dottie was a Florida-strain fish, and the IGFA now files Kurita’s Lake Biwa bass as a Florida bass. The fish most likely to outweigh Perry’s is therefore not, by the new rules, a largemouth at all. The IGFA also keeps an all-tackle length record for largemouth: 65 cm (25.6 in), set in California in 2015 and tied twice in Florida, in 2018 and 2021.

Where could the next record come from?

The candidates are the waters that produced the list. Southern California’s small, clear reservoirs grow Florida-strain bass to record size: Castaic Lake gave Crupi his 22-pounder, Dixon Lake gave Dottie. California’s state record is a different fish, Michael Arujo’s 21 lb 12 oz from Castaic Lake in March 1991; Crupi’s heavier fish stands in the IGFA line-class book instead. Then there is Lake Biwa, and there are the trophy lakes of Texas, where the state’s ShareLunker program collects and spawns bass of 13 lb or more. The Texas record is Barry St. Clair’s 18.18 lb (8.2 kg) from Lake Fork, January 1992. O.H. Ivie gave up a 17.03-pounder in February 2023.

Does any of them hold a fair-hooked, genetically pure largemouth over 22 lb 6 oz? That is the question the record has asked for more than ninety years. The largemouth bass page has the growth and age data behind the odds. The bass hub has the season pattern, and how to catch bass the outfit, for the anglers who keep trying.

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