Steve Jenkins will probably never again skip checking the spot regardless of the conditions. You wouldn’t either if it produced a potential state record bass.

Jenkins played a hunch early on the morning of Saturday, Aug. 2 as he and tournament partner Mike Selvage competed in a Southwest Custom Tackle Summer Slam tournament at Roosevelt Lake in central Arizona about 80 miles northeast of Phoenix. The hunch was to stop on a spot that had been good in years past, but oftentimes the water level seems to dictate if the bass are there or not.

As Jenkins studied his forward-facing sonar screen, he saw fish in and around some structure that’s located in about 30 feet of water adjacent to a big drop off. Worth a few casts, he figured. He and Selvage caught a couple keepers before Jenkins had one break his line, forcing him to retie.

Little did he know his next drop down toward that structure would (potentially) put his name in the Arizona bass fishing record books. So he rigged up another 6-inch Roboworm straight tail worm in the morning dawn hologram hue on a 1/0 EWG hook above a 1/4-ounce weight. His 2500-sized spinning reel was spooled with 10-pound Berkley Nanofil paired with a 7-pound leader of Sunline Super FC Sniper.

“I never felt the bite. I just felt weight,” said Jenkins in a phone interview Monday afternoon.

He just wasn’t sure how much weight.

“As soon as I hooked it, it headed directly east and into the sun,” he said. “It pulled drag for 15 seconds then came up and jumped. We only saw its silhouette because it jumped right in line with where the sun was hitting the water. Mike saw it for a moment and said, ‘Holy crap! It’s a 10-pounder!’”

The fish dove again and darted to the right, then to the left. Jenkins put his trolling motor on high and began to chase the fish.

“We finally got on top of it and I was extra careful to not get the line fouled up in anything,” he said. “We saw the leader coming up and we saw the fish. Mike netted it and got it in the boat.”

It was 7 a.m. local time. They were due to weigh in at 12:15 p.m., a nod to the punishing summer heat in Arizona.

“It was intense,” Jenkins said. “There were some other guys about 40 yards away. They said, ‘We saw you guys fighting a fish and thought it was a good one.’”

Jenkins, who owns and operates A-1 Auto Repair in Apache Junction, Ariz., has caught some big fish before – a couple 9- and 10-pounders – and by his estimate he figured the fish to be in the 12- or 13-pound range.

Oh, how wrong he was.

Jenkins and Selvage didn’t weigh or measure the fish in the boat as they were more concerned with taking care of the fish. They immediately allocated one half of the livewell in Jenkins’ Phoenix boat to the gargantuan fish. It barely fit, Jenkins said.

They fished for another hour or so before stopping at a marina for ice to keep the livewell water cool. He fizzed the fish twice to keep barotrauma at bay.

“It’s the biggest thing I’ve caught in my lifetime,” Jenkins said. “I didn’t want it to die.”
The tournament became a secondary concern for Jenkins, who has fished Roosevelt on and off for 25 years, but only got into tournaments 10 years ago. When Jenkins and Selvage arrived back at the ramp for weigh-in, he called over a friend and fellow competitor to offer him a glimpse of the fish.

“He usually does really well there and has caught some giants there,” Jenkins said. “He said, ‘That’s a giant, man.’”

Word started to spread through the weigh-in line and other anglers began to take photos and videos. Jenkins trailered his boat and drove up to the weigh-in tent. He retrieved the fish from the livewell and with both hands grasping its lower jaw, he jumped down off the gunnel of his boat and walked 10 or so feet to the scale where the fish was placed in a weigh-in bag and set in the basket. The digital display read 16.57 pounds.

Jenkins and Selvage’s limit totaled 26.07 pounds, good enough for second in the 38-boat tournament behind the team of Mick Pageler and Leland Pageler, who had 27.11 pounds, including an 8.62-pound kicker.

“My goal was to win the tournament,” Jenkins added. “We fished hard the rest of the day but then it was about keeping that fish alive.”

After posing for a few more photos with the massive fish, Jenkins released it back into the lake. He said it swam off without any issue. He does plan to have a replica mount made and he has reached out to the Arizona Game & Fish Department about having the fish certified as the state record. The current record is 16 pounds, 7.68 ounces, caught by Randall E. White on March 8, 1997 at Canyon Lake. Converted to ounces, Jenkins’ fish would be 16 pounds, 9.28 ounces.

“It was just fun,” Jenkins said. “We had so many people congratulating us. People I don’t know. Even people that don’t really fish on the dock. It was the biggest fish they’d ever seen. It was everything. The whole experience. We had no idea it was that big. I never thought I could weigh something that big.”