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By Steven Bardin and Gary Klein
Bradley Roy record-breaking bass pro tour season just getting started
The 2022 season has already churned out record largemouth and spots . Could smallmouth be next ?
The 2022 Bass Pro Tour season started off with three unbelievable , record-breaking events . Randy Howell put on a giant largemouth bass spectacle during the Knockout and Championship rounds of Stage One to start the season , three anglers put themselves into the big-bass record books at Stage Two at Lake Fork , and , quietly , Stage Three saw the league-record spotted bass weight broken five times at Lewis Smith Lake .
Watching all these records fall got us thinking about how to highlight the fish , the anglers carving their names into the early Bass Pro Tour history books , and the fisheries that are producing such exciting events . We partnered with MLF analyst Marty Stone and dove into the BPT stats to pull out as much information as we possibly could to highlight these three events – as well as give you the records that may fall the rest of the season .
record-shattering largemouth
When the 2022 schedule was released , we all circled Caney Creek and Bussey Brake as fisheries that could have potential to be extremely special – and they certainly proved us right . Since the implementation of the variable minimum-scorable-bass weight , Lake Fork had the highest average catch weight for any fishery for a full-field stage event at 3 pounds , 8 ounces . This came during the five days of competition during Stage Three in 2020 , with the single best day of that event averaging 3-10 per fish caught . The one-day Knockout Round on Caney Creek broke that record by 2 ounces with an average catch weight of 3-12 .
The previous heaviest largemouth bass in league history also came from Lake Fork in 2020 , weighing 10-8 . Randy Howell broke that record on Caney Creek by landing a largemouth weighing 10-11 . The record breaking continued at Stage One in the Championship Round at Bussey Brake when Howell smashed his own record by catching a 12-14 behemoth largemouth . Bussey Brake fished tough , producing only 31 scorable bass , and with that low total and the true giants caught there , Bussey Brake broke the single-day average fish weight record as well , at an unbelievable average weight of 5-4 per bass weighed in .
Stage Two was held on historic Lake Fork in Texas , and Howell ’ s reign holding the No . 1 and No . 2 largest fish in Bass Pro Tour history was short-lived , as Stage Two proved to be just as magical as the previous event . On Qualifying Day 1 of
12 MAJORLEAGUEFISHING . COM | APRIL-MAY 2022