World Record Smallmouth Bass: The Hayes Fish and the False Affidavit

The world record smallmouth bass weighs 11 lb 15 oz (5.41 kg). David L. Hayes caught it at Dale Hollow Lake, on the Kentucky–Tennessee line, on July 9, 1955. In 1996 the record was struck off over a sworn statement that the fish had been stuffed with lead. Nine years later the IGFA put it back and apologized, and it has held the title ever since.

For nine years the world record smallmouth was officially a fake, on the word of a guide the resort had fired. What helped give it back was a tape measure: Hayes’s fish was longer and thicker than the one that replaced it.

How did David Hayes catch the record in 1955?

Hayes, from Leitchfield, Kentucky, was trolling from a 21-ft cruiser with his wife and six-year-old son aboard. At about 10 a.m. he swung into a cut between Illwill Creek and Phillips Bottom, just north of Trooper Island, in Kentucky waters. He had about 300 ft (90 m) of line out behind a pearl Bomber 600, a diving plug of the kind now sold as a crankbait, bumping bottom between weed beds. The tackle was a Tru-Temper steel rod, a Penn Peer 209 reel and 20 lb line, and he had the fish in the net by 10:30.

He put the fish in a cooler and kept fishing. Around noon, low on gas, he stopped at Wisdom Dock. Dockhand Granville “Lightnin’” Madison weighed the bass while a Kentucky Water Police officer, Oral Burtram, looked on: one ounce short of 12 lb. At Cedar Hill Resort, where Hayes kept his boat, it went on certified scales and weighed 11 lb 15 oz again. It measured 27 in (69 cm) long with a girth of 21⅔ in (55 cm).

Hayes made one mistake: he let the Cedar Hill dockhands handle the fish out of his sight. That gap is where the later accusation lived.

The record documents give the date as July 9, 1955. The IGFA’s own 2005 news release said July 8, a slip Bassmaster pointed out at the time.

Why was the record taken away in 1996?

On August 17, 1955, more than a month after the catch, a guide named Raymond “Doughbelly” Barlow brought an affidavit to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers office at Dale Hollow. In it his nephew, John H. Barlow, swore he had shoved 3 lb (1.4 kg) of motor parts and sinkers down the fish’s throat and pinned it shut with a treble hook. The real weight, he claimed, was 8 lb 15 oz.

The Corps keeps no fishing records, so the paper sat in a file for 40 years. In the mid-1990s a Tennessee assistant principal, Eldon Davis, decided the mounted fish did not look like 12 lb. He found the affidavit, then found John Barlow, who passed a private polygraph.

It worked. In 1996 the IGFA, the National Fresh Water Fishing Hall of Fame and Kentucky struck the fish from their books. Nobody at the IGFA asked Hayes for his side; he heard the news from a Bassmaster writer. The title passed to John Gorman’s 10 lb 14 oz (4.93 kg) Dale Hollow fish of 1969.

The men behind the affidavit had motives. Cedar Hill’s owner, Dick Roberts, had already fired John Barlow as a guide. The lawyer who drew it up, Jimmy Reneau, owned the rival Holly Creek Resort, and his sister notarized it. Sending it to the Corps rather than to Field & Stream, the record keeper in 1955, suggests the target was Roberts’s resort more than Hayes.

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How did Hayes get the record back?

Tennessee did not follow. In the summer of 1996 its wildlife agency sent Ron Fox, assistant executive director, to talk to every living witness. John Barlow’s brother Ira swore John was nowhere near the fish that day, and passed a polygraph of his own. Bobby Stone, the Cedar Hill clerk who slept on the freezer holding the fish until it went to the taxidermist, said its throat was never pinned shut. In March 1997 Tennessee kept Hayes as its state record, and the Hall of Fame reinstated him in 1999.

The IGFA held out until Bassmaster published “The Case for David Hayes” in October 2005. On November 22, 2005, Fox and Bassmaster’s Ken Duke took the file to IGFA headquarters in Dania Beach, Florida. One comparison carried particular weight. Gorman’s 10 lb 14 oz fish, the record by then, was 26¼ in long with a 21½ in girth. Hayes’s fish was longer and thicker, so it had to weigh more.

On December 12, 2005, the IGFA reinstated the record. Jason Schratweiser, its fishing and science director, called Hayes, then 80, to apologize, and the IGFA gave him a life membership. Kentucky announced on December 21, 2005, that it had reinstated the fish as its state record too. “It’s good to be vindicated after all these years,” Hayes said.

The record controversy, year by year

1. July 9, 1955. Hayes catches the 11 lb 15 oz fish at Dale Hollow.
2. August 17, 1955. The Barlow affidavit reaches the Corps of Engineers and is filed away.
3. 1969. John Gorman catches a 10 lb 14 oz smallmouth at Dale Hollow.
4. April 14, 1986. Paul Beal’s 10 lb 8 oz fish from Hendricks Creek, a Kentucky arm of Dale Hollow, sets the men’s 8 lb line record that still stands.
5. 1995–1996. The affidavit resurfaces. The IGFA, the Hall of Fame and Kentucky strike the record; Gorman’s fish takes the title.
6. March 1997. Tennessee keeps Hayes as its state record after Fox’s inquiry.
7. 1999. The Hall of Fame reinstates the fish.
8. December 12, 2005. The IGFA reinstates it and apologizes.
9. 2016 to 2024. New state records in Michigan (9.98 lb) and New York (9 lb), both short of 10 lb.
10. September 16, 2026. A fish in Idaho beats the length record and does not count.

The world record muskie shows the other ending to a record fight: Art Lawton’s fish was thrown out in 1992 and never restored.

Did the record fish really weigh 11 lb 15 oz?

Fisheries biologists use a standard-weight equation to say what a well-fed fish of a given length weighs; for smallmouth it is Kolander et al. (1993). Divide the real weight by that standard and you get relative weight. At 100 the fish matches the standard; far below it, the fish is thin.

Our calculation from the Kolander et al. (1993) equation and the recorded lengths and weights.

The result is the strongest case for Hayes. At 11 lb 15 oz his fish sits just under the standard for its length, exactly where Gorman’s does. Take away Barlow’s 3 lb and it would have been a far thinner fish than any record-class smallmouth in the table. The modern giants are the opposite: shorter fish, packed with weight.

Which state holds the record, Kentucky or Tennessee?

Both. Hayes hooked the fish in the Kentucky waters of Dale Hollow, and Kentucky has listed it again since 2005. Tennessee never took it off its list. The IGFA files it under “Dale Hollow Lake, Tennessee”. One fish, two state records, one world record.

The IGFA smallmouth records by line class and length

The IGFA keeps more than one record per species. Besides the all-tackle record (the heaviest fish on any legal tackle), there are line-class records set by the breaking strength of the line, fly-tippet records, and an all-tackle length record for fish measured and released.

Two patterns stand out. Two of the three men’s light-line records, the 2 lb and 6 lb classes, are Pickwick Lake fish of the late 1990s, from the Tennessee River where Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee meet. The women’s records are recent Lake Michigan fish, though a 5 lb 5 oz fish from Japan was pending for the 2 lb class in October 2026. Wired2Fish counted six fish in the length tie: the IGFA also holds two 53 cm fly-caught fish (McCormack 2025, Senyohl 2026) in a separate fly length category.

What is the biggest smallmouth in each state?

The table lists only records confirmed on the state agency’s own list or release. Ohio is the exception, labeled: its list is kept by the Outdoor Writers of Ohio, not by the state.

The three heaviest are Southern fish from 1950 to 1955, all from the Tennessee and Cumberland river systems. The newer records come from the north: Michigan, Idaho and New York. Idaho also keeps a catch-and-release length record, set twice at Dworshak in 2022, most recently by Joey Walton’s 23¾ in (60 cm) fish.

Has anyone come close to the record since?

Not on weight. No smallmouth over 10 lb has entered the IGFA book since Beal’s in 1986. The nearest modern fish came from Lake Erie on November 3, 2022, when Gregg Gallagher caught a 10.15 lb (4.60 kg) smallmouth on a drop-shot rig in Ontario waters. It was 23¾ in long and replaced an Ontario record of 9.84 lb. Ohio DNR biologists aged it at 16 years, and it is the biggest smallmouth on record from the Great Lakes.

On length, a record nearly fell on September 16, 2026. Montana angler Daniel Caricaburu-Lundin caught an 8 lb 6 oz smallmouth on an unnamed Idaho lake, on a glide bait he makes himself. His own bump board read 22 in to the fork, well past the 53 cm (20.9 in) record. He had an IGFA measuring board in the boat but released the fish without using it, so it cannot count.

Will the world record smallmouth ever be broken?

Under IGFA rules a new all-tackle record must beat the old one by 2 oz, so the target is 12 lb 1 oz (5.47 kg). The same rule left Manabu Kurita’s 2009 bass only tied with the world record largemouth.

The record book makes it a long shot. Dale Hollow’s dam was finished in 1943, so the lake was 12 years old when Hayes caught his fish, and it produced the two biggest smallmouth ever weighed and one of the two 10 lb 8 oz fish behind them. The modern contenders are deep, clear northern waters: Lake Erie, the St. Lawrence, Lake Michigan and Dworshak. They grow heavy smallmouth, but so far not one has reached 11 lb.

Short answers

How old is a record-size smallmouth? Gallagher’s 10.15 lb fish was a 16-year-old female, hatched in 2006. Age alone does not make a giant: Idaho biologists found two 7-year-old Dworshak smallmouth almost 4 in apart, depending on how many kokanee salmon there were to eat while they grew.

Is a 5 lb smallmouth big? Yes. At the standard weight, a smallmouth reaches 5 lb at about 20.4 in (52 cm). That is past the 20 in “trophy” line in the length categories biologists use. The smallmouth bass page has growth, range and seasons, and smallmouth vs largemouth shows how to tell the two apart.

Is there a 50-pound bass? No black bass comes close. The largemouth record is 22 lb 4 oz, and the biggest bass ever weighed, the foul-hooked Dottie, was 25 lb 1 oz. The bass hub covers every species and where each grows biggest.

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