Family-Outdoors

If not for the two that got away, tournament anglers Marco Vaca and Doyle Idleman might possibly have weighed-in a five-bass stringer of nearly 50 pounds. As it turned out, their 42.71-pound sack on March 23 at Lake of the Arbuckles was enough to win the Future Bass Team Trail's first 2014 divisional contest, Trail director Joe Copeland said. The giant stringer also eclipsed Arbuckle's heavy-sack record: 42.04 pounds caught by former Elite Series angler Jeff Reynolds and Johnny Thompson in January 2013. For the past several years, Lake of the Arbuckles in the Chickasaw National Recreation Area has been giving up lunker largemouth bass. Vaca and Idleman's largest fish bent the scale at 10.93 pounds, but even that did not win the biggest-bass honor at the tournament! The second-place team of Terry Alsup and Brad Hill had the day's big bass at 11.69 pounds, with a five-fish stringer totaling 34.16 pounds. Six bass at the tournament weigh-in went more than 1...

SULPHUR, Okla. - Recent remarkable catches at Lake of the Arbuckles have made a big splash in the local bass fishing community. On successive weekends in January, the winners of separate bass tournaments managed to haul in five-fish stringers totaling more than 40 pounds each.             That means each of the five largemouth bass on these two stringers weighed on average more than 8 pounds apiece!             The lunkers validate the fisheries management activities conducted by the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation over the previous decade at Lake of the Arbuckles.             "The ingredients that you need to produce trophy bass are present in Arbuckle right now," said Gene Gilliland, assistant chief of fisheries with the Wildlife Department. "I really like seeing how Arbuckle has become quite a success story from a fisheries m...