INDIAN RIVER, Mich. — Catching Michigan’s new state record smallmouth bass was almost too easy for Bruce Kraemer. About 5 p.m. on Sept. 11, he simply stepped out the back door of his cottage on Indian River, tossed out a nightcrawler on a three-way rig and bam!
Just an eyelash away from double digits, his monster smallie weighed 9.98 pounds, more than 8 ounces heavier than the previous record, caught in 2015.
“When I set the hook, I first thought that I had a goby. But when I pulled, it didn’t move and I thought I was snagged on the bottom,” said the angler from Treasure Island, Fla., who spends summers at the cottage in the northern part of Michigan’s lower peninsula.
“But then it started moving toward the middle of the river.”
Kraemer bested the beast with what he described as an “older” spinning outfit rigged with 8-pound P-Line fluorocarbon, with 10-pound line as the leader under the swivel. The crawler was impaled on a No. 4 Eagle Claw hook.
“I had the weight on the bottom, with the nightcrawler above it to keep the gobies away,” he explained.
“In just the last four years, anglers have caught a total of 16 state-record fish, a remarkable number of big fish in a relatively short time,” said Jim Dexter, chief of fisheries for the Michigan Department of Natural Resources (MDNR). “This is just more evidence that Michigan is home to a healthy, robust fishery — a resource and sporting opportunity that continues to draw people from all over.”
Kraemer agreed with that assessment.
“I used to catch a lot of walleyes here,” he said. “But now it’s mostly smallmouth bass. I’ve caught lots of 3- and 4-pounders, too, but nothing like this one.
“And for the last three or four weeks, I hadn’t caught much of anything.”
Normally, Kraemer would have been back in Florida on the day he caught the bass, but his neighbor, Ron Krieg, convinced him to stay a little longer.
“He also netted the fish for me and talked me into entering it into the fishing contest at Pat and Gary’s Party Store,” the angler said.
The store clerk recognized that the bass might be more than just a contest winner, and MDNR was contacted. Biologist Tim Cwalinski verified the catch as the new record.
The previous record belonged to Greg Gasiciel, who caught a smallie weighing 9.33 pounds in October 2015 on Hubbard Lake. Before that, Michigan’s record for more than a century was 9.25 pounds. It was taken in 1906 at Long Lake.
