Retired plumber reels in $50,000 prize

Herbert Holman, winner of the Arkansas Big Bass Bonanza
Herbert Holman, winner of the Arkansas Big Bass Bonanza

Herbert Holman won the $50,000 grand prize in the Arkansas Big Bass Bonanza Sunday with a 7.25-pound largemouth bass he caught Friday in Lake Dardanelle.

The Big Bass Bonanza awarded prizes to the largest three bass caught in five pools every hour from Friday to Sunday. The angler that catches the biggest bass from each pool wins $10,000, and the angler that catches the largest bass overall earns a $40,000 bonus for a total prize of $50,000.

The $10,000 winners were Lucas Wilkins, who took top honors in the Fort Smith Pool with a 7.05-pound bass, Don Douglas, whose 5.55-pound bass won the North Little Rock Pool, Bart Moore who won the Pine Bluff Pool with a 5.64 pounder, and Josh Moreland, who won the Dumas Pool with a 6.13 pounder.

Rance Warden and his father Rocky Warden, both of Searcy, won the $1,000 Willowleaf Award, which goes to the generational team (father/son, mother/daughter, etc.) that catches the biggest bass of that class. Their fish weighed 4.4 pounds.

Holman, 67, of Delaware, near Russellville, a retired plumber, caught the winning bass at Friday at 11:50 a.m., in Shoal Bay. He used a half-ounce Terminator spinnerbait in chartreuse, white and green. He used 17-pound test line, a Shimano baitcasting reel with a 5:1 retrieve ratio and a Berkley rod. He said he caught the bass while fishing a small grassline in an open water area.

"He came up out of the water, and I saw he was big, but didn't know how big he was until I got him in the boat," Holman said Sunday during the awards ceremony in North Little Rock. "When I saw how big he was, I cranked up the big motor and took it to the weigh-in station."

Holman said he spent most of the morning fishing another area. He was motoring to another area when he stopped on a hunch to fish the grass line.

"It was pure luck for me to hook it there," Holman said.

Holman, who has fished the Big Bass Bonanza for 18 years, said he's fished Lake Dardanelle for several decades. He is familiar with Shoal Bay area in particular and said it's an excellent place to catch big bass.

"It's got a lot of steep banks, a lot of up and down, and a lot of stumps on the bottom," Holman said.

This is the second consecutive year that the winning bass was caught in Lake Dardanelle. The Dumas Pool produced most of the winners for the past 10 years.

"It feels great to keep this thing going in Dardanelle," Holman said. "I actually thought about going down there (Dumas) to fish because I don't know the water, and I wanted to do something different."

The worst part of catching such a big fish on the first day, Holman said, was having to wait all the weekend for somebody else to catch a bigger fish.

"It was horrible," Holman said. "The stress in the last two hours of today was unbelievable, but I kept fishing."

Freddie Black, chairman of Simmons Bank, the Big Bass Bonanza's signature sponsor, encouraged Holman to contact one of the bank's financial advisors to help invest his winnings.

"The first thing I'm going to do is pay off my new truck," Holman said.

Montine McNulty, executive director of the Arkansas Hospitality Association, which hosts the Big Bass Bonanza, said that the tournament paid $78,750 in hourly bonus money and $193,750 overall. Hourly prizes for the top three bass in each pool were $450, $250 and $175, respectively.

The tournament paid $14,000 in bonuses to anglers that weighed in fish while wearing official 2016 Big Bass Bonanza caps and T-shirts.

Three anglers were disqualified, McNulty said, including one in the Fort Smith Pool that failed a polygraph after weighing in a bass that weighed 7.2 pounds.

"He admitted to not catching the bass on the Arkansas River and not catching it the day he weighed it," McNulty said. The other two anglers were disqualified for failing to wear their life jackets.

"That just shows the sytem works," McNulty said. "It was an extremely well-run tournament. We had good participation, and we want it to be bigger and better."

Sports on 06/27/2016

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