If you’re watching “Bassmaster LIVE,” you witnessed as emotional a moment as you’ll see in this sport. Carl Jocumsen completed a 35th birthday five-bass limit with a 3-pound, 8-ounce smallmouth bass.
“That could be a $100,000 fish!” said Jocumsen, before he was simply overcome by the moment and was left breathing hard on the boat deck, flat on his back.
Jocumsen doesn’t know what anybody else has today, but he knows he’s got close to 20 pounds, which would be three pounds heavier than any other limit weighed previously this week. Making the moment even more dramatic, Jocumsen went almost four hours between the last fish in his four-bass, 16-pound flurry, which ended at 8:33 a.m., and his fifth fish, which came at 12:13 p.m.
In looking back over Jocumsen’s comments at the weigh-in yesterday, he may not have had a feeling something like this was going to happen, but he was completely dialed-in on what he was going to do today – fish that 3/4-ounce football jig on structure 22- to 35-feet deep.
“I just have to put every other rod away and not have anything else on my mind,” he said. “If it’s my time, it’s going to happen.”