Georgia woman snags a record with ‘big ol’ fish’

Then she felt it — a tap, just a little bump. Bream, she thought, not the shoal bass she sought. She set the hook.

The creature rocketed away, diving below a stump and snagging the fishing line. Brown motored to the obstruction, figuring her lure — fish, too — were gone.

“Then the drag (on the reel) just squealed,” she said. “I thought I had a big ol’ fish.”

She did. Brown, 35, went looking for one trophy, but found another. She now holds the Georgia record for —

But let’s back up a bit.

Brown is an avid angler. Her earliest memories are of a little girl playing on the banks of the Kinchafoonee Creek in Lee County, a 2 ½-hour drive south of Atlanta. A family photo shows her standing with her grandmother, who’s holding a finned behemoth she’d just taken from a Georgia lake. The fish is bigger than the granddaughter.

Brown now lives in Mitchell County, in a cabin on the banks of the Flint. “I’ve been fishing,” she said, “ever since I could hold a pole in my hands.”

Fishing a lot, too. When she’s not cutting hair, her full-time job, Brown’s in her boat. She fishes on Wednesdays, Sundays “and whenever I can get on the river.”

So there she was, June 1, fighting something that zipped away from a stump and was swimming hard. Brown cranked the reel, bringing the fish closer. It zig-zagged. She cranked some more. The fish ran. She cranked. And so it went, fish vs. woman.

But time was on Brown’s side. The fish began to tire. Brown motored closer to the exhausted swimmer. She leaned over her boat —

Let's change direction for a moment. The state Department of Natural Resources keeps track of all sorts of trophy creatures. Its web site lists various state records for fish.

The king of all records: that set in 1932 by George Perry. Fishing for supper, he landed a world- as well as a state-record largemouth bass – 22 pounds, 4 ounces. The leviathan came from an oxbow lake off the Ocmulgee River.

Another state record: an uncommonly large common carp, 35-pounds, 12 ounces, caught by the Rev. Donald Clark. The preacher caught that creature in Lake Jackson in 1972.

Rainbow trout? Tip your cap to to Mark Cochran, who pulled up a 17-pound, 4-ounce beauty from the Soque River in Habersham County. That record has stood for 12 years.

Guys, make room for an angler whose preferred fishing attire comes in two pieces — a bikini top and bottom. She is one of three female anglers who hold Georgia records.

That brings us back to the woman, the boat, the fish.

Brown stared at her catch. She took in its glistening scales, the mottled spots. She'd never seen such a creature. Brown reached for her cell phone and thumbed on its camera. Click!

She showed the fish to her friends. They scratched their heads. Maybe it was some weird hybrid?

Brown emailed the image to DNR, with a question: Can you tell me what kind of fish this is?

A DNR biologist answered with an email of his own. Brown, he wrote, had caught Ambloplites ariommus, commonly known as a shadow bass.

She wrote back: What's the state record?

There isn't one, DNR answered.

Until now. The monster that Brown pulled out of the water is the first in a new category. Brown did some Googling around to learn more about her trophy. Her fish, she discovered, beats the scales off the skimpy little shadow bass that holds the record in Mississippi. And it’s not far off from a monster specimen caught in the Ozarks.

It’s such a fine fish that she’s having it mounted — all 10 ounces, 9.25 inches of it.

The shadow bass, dear reader, is but a shadow of larger varieties of bass. In fact, it's part of the sunfish family, not a bass at all.

No matter. Brown holds the record, and she’s delighted. She’s not saying where she caught it — unless you’re unmarried and handsome, with a male ego that can handle possibility of getting out-angled by a woman.

“Just let them know I’m single,” Brown said. “And I have my own boat.”