By Jim Harris
Managing Editor, Arkansas Wildlife Magazine
Article submitted by the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission
MONTICELLO — A bass angling friend told Rod Martinez late last week that the fish were biting really well at Lake Monticello, so he headed that way Saturday, anxious to see what he might land.
“I thought I might go catch a big fish,” he said.
Despite a late start from his hometown of Benton, Martinez indeed found the bass biting — maybe not quite as well as his friend, Jimi Easterling, had hinted two days earlier, but good nonetheless.
He caught five fish on five consecutive casts, all on a jig, which convinced him to stick with that bait all day. One fish among 14 total catches measured 7.1 pounds, a couple were 4-pounders, nothing was less than 2 pounds, and he said his fishing buddy also caught a 5-pounder.
Then came the fish that made the trip truly worthwhile. Around 1:40 p.m., he had a really big one take hold of his jig. The bass fought well and came to the surface two or three times, he recalled. Neither he nor buddy Dave Lewis had a net handy, but Martinez safely got the massive fish into the boat. His own scale, topping 10 pounds, told him that a call to the Arkansas Legacy Lunker hotline was in order.
Will Lancett, the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission’s coordinator of the Arkansas Legacy Lunker program, was already picking up Legacy Lunker Number Nine from Lower White Oak Lake. Local fisheries biologists Ryan Mozisek and Levi Olhausen met up with Martinez at the ramp and provided fish care until Lancett could arrive to officially weigh the fish to see if it would qualify for the program.
Lancett’s official scale measured Martinez’s fish at 10.22 pounds, and then it was headed to the Joe Hogan State Fish Hatchery in Lonoke to join eight other donated Lunkers, where they will be part of an AGFC program to breed more potential big bass for Arkansas lakes.
The AGFC’s first Legacy Lunker season opened Jan. 1 and runs until March 31. All anglers donating their fish between Jan. 1 and March 31 receive a reproduction mount from Harper’s Pure Country Taxidermy. They also are entered into a drawing for a 21-foot Xpress boat courtesy of Xpress Boats of Hot Springs.
“I used to fish Monticello a long time ago, in the ’90s,” Martinez said. “It’s changed quite a bit. There’s a little less trees in the water. That big house isn’t there. Some of the timber looks like it has decayed a little bit. I also saw a lot of fish attractors down there that I didn’t see before. There’s a lot of good fish in there, I can tell you that much, and a place I’m going to want to go back to quite a bit.”
With the city of Monticello’s cooperation as the lake’s owner, the AGFC renovated the lake before refilling and stocking for forage began in 2021. It’s been a slow process on the refilling end, as Monticello has areas that can run as deep as 60 feet when the lake is at full capacity, while it’s fed by two creeks that only appear to have water when it rains. There hasn’t been much rain in Arkansas in some time. Right now, according to Ryan Mozisek, AGFC district supervisor at Monticello, the lake is 8 feet below full pool and is still maybe two years from reaching that level.
But ever since harvest resumed there on Feb. 1, anglers have been turning out, he said.
“The last four times I’ve been to the lake, if it’s not full (of anglers), it’s almost full,” Mozisek said. “A lot of crappie guys told me they didn’t want to fish the lake until they could keep fish. And so, there’s an influx of the crappie guys, and the word’s gotten out that the big bass are biting, so the pressure is definitely picking up.”
Anglers may keep five bass daily, though only one may be longer than 16 inches. Crappie harvest is 15 crappie daily, and only seven fish may be longer than 12 inches.
Bass harvest was implemented Feb. 1 to help remove some of the smaller fish, so the larger ones can grow even more. Mozisek says that based on what he’s seen through electrofishing sampling and using his own rod-and-reel, the growth of bass there has been startling, especially considering the stocking of sport fish began just three years ago.
“The bass in Lake Monticello appear to be growing almost twice as much compared to other lakes around the state. We have been monitoring their growth via length at age, and it is far more impressive than most Arkansas fisheries,” he said. “March of 2024, we had 6½-pound bass that were 2½ years old. You usually don’t see a 6½-pound bass unless it’s anywhere from 5 to 8 years old in Arkansas.”
Typically, bass on average gain about a pound a year. “We’re getting 2 or more pounds a year on these fish,” he said. “You can see that fishing. When I first started out there, all you caught were 3-pound fish. By the end of the year, they were 4 pounds. Then the next spring they were 5½ pounds.”
The driving factors for growth, he said, are a large amount of vegetation that was allowed to grow on the lakebed during renovation, lots of nutrients now available in the water, and lots of food for fewer bass than normal for a lake this size.
“Right now, there are probably the fewest bass in that lake that there’s going to be,” Mozisek said. “So, they have all the food at their disposal.”
People watching the goings on at Lake Conway, now about halfway into the biggest lake renovation in the AGFC’s history, should be encouraged by the success story of Lake Monticello.
“The good thing about Conway is, you get two big rains once the work is finished, and the lake is going to be full or almost full,” Mozisek said. “Once it’s back full of water like it used to be, it’s not going to take two, three years before the fishing is going to be good enough where people are going to want to come.”
