THREE RIVERS, Mich. — They say there’s plenty of fish in the sea, but Bob Golec believes he’s caught the only golden bass in Portage Lake near Three Rivers.
“Using just a plastic worm, jigging on the weed beds, I caught it, I hooked it, thought, ‘Man, this is a good fish,’” Bob recalls. “[It] jumped out of the water, and all the sudden I see this golden fish. I was like, ‘What the heck?’”
He thought it was diseased, but after a quick Google search, Bob found what he caught wasn’t actually ill but just a really sick catch.
“[I] get on my phone, check it out, and there it is: ‘golden bass,’ one of the rarest fish to be caught.”
Bob says this is the catch of a lifetime.
“I feel blessed, more than special. And I mean that seriously,” he says. “This lake out here, and all the lakes I fish, they’ve provided our family with a lot of great meals and camaraderie.”
It was a catch the whole neighborhood at the lake came to see.
What Bob says is even more rare is that this fish made it through its younger years without being eaten by predators. The fish is estimated to be 5 to 6 years old.
So what’s the next stop for the fish? The taxidermist.
“I told my wife we’re gonna put it in the living room,” says Bob. “And she goes, ‘No, you’re not.’”
The placement at home for this rare find is still up in the air.
“I caught it and, like I said, I didn’t know what it was,” says Bob. “Truthfully, if we didn’t have these cell phones like we do, I probably would have thrown it back.”
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