By John N. Felsher

Even though March 15, 1999, fell on a Monday, more than 450 boats entered the 16,000-acre Lacassine Pool as a new bass season opened.

To provide a seasonal sanctuary for visiting waterfowl, the pool normally closes from Oct. 16 through March 14. Levees enclosed marshland and old farmland years ago to create the pool on the 34,886-acre Lacassine National Wildlife Refuge near Lake Arthur. Weirs normally hold water levels in the rain-fed reservoir at about 3 feet deep.

Inside the pool, vast stretches of matted grass, canes, reeds and water lilies provide cover for hungry bass. Canals ringing the perimeter and a few boat trails offer water as deep as 6 feet. Stocked with Florida bass and other species, the entire system has created a fish paradise of clear water and dense cover in which a rich variety of abundant food helps to fatten the lunkers up.

Each spring, many anglers arrive to take advantage of big bass that haven't seen lures in months. Without pressure, these lunkers lose some of their wariness and respond well to lures in the days after the pool reopens. During past tournaments, some five-bass stringers weighed more than 31 pounds.

Since the impoundment offers one of the best places in southwest Louisiana for landing a double-digit largemouth bass, hundreds of anglers might line up hours before opening time on the roads leading to the two public launches. Some people camp in their vehicles just to get an early jump on the competition racing to the best spots.

"In past years, we've had quite a few bass in the 8- to 11-pound range," said Wayne Syron, a refuge biologist. "It's not unusual to see 300 trailers lined up on opening day."

This nice bigmouth fell to a noisy topwater plug in Lacassine NWR's marshes. Photo by John N. Felsher

By most standards, Harris and his father Wilford had already enjoyed a wonderful spring day of fishing on March 22, 1999, one week after the pool reopened. The pair drifted over grass flats and worked lures among the thick reeds. They worked over several holes in the grassy cover, enticing occasional strikes from hungry largemouths.

Before noon, they had already boated and released four or five bass in the 5-pound range and some smaller fish. Sweltering under the murderously bright midday sun after their successful morning, they considered calling it quits; then Harris landed another largemouth bass, a 4 1/2-pounder. Moments later, in sparkling-clear water, he noticed a shadow on the bottom, about 4 to 5 feet deep, near a mudflat.

"I threw a black and blue lizard with a 3/16-ounce weight about five or six times at her before she hit," he recalled. "We missed her the first time with the net, and I started cussing. Then she came around again. We thought she was about an 8-pounder until she turned sideways. Then we realized she was bigger than that. It was the biggest bass I ever caught."

And it was certainly the biggest bass that anyone had ever caught at Lacassine Pool. At 11.62 pounds, the goliath of a fish edged out the old refuge record, held by an 11.56-pounder caught in June 1996. One impressive thing about this bass: She had already spawned. She might have weighed more than 14 pounds a few days earlier!

In June 1999, Al Mouton and Larry Landry were fishing in an afternoon bass tournament and pulled in three fish that weighed 21.07 pounds, thus topping the previous three-fish record, set only one week earlier, by about 3 pounds. With a 9.56-pound largemouth anchoring the stringer, they figured that they'd won all the money.

However, Danny Demary and Doug Logan greeted them at the boat launch with a three-fish stringer weighing - 23.07 pounds!

On that hot summer evening, Demary and Logan had been using 3/4-ounce gold weedless spoons sweetened with No. 11 pork frogs bounced over small silver-dollar lilies. Logan landed an 8.06-pounder and a 7.10-pounder, and a 2-pounder was lipped to complete a solid three-fish tournament limit approaching 18 pounds - which only three weeks earlier would have been good enough just to approach the record.

However, at about 8 p.m., another bucketmouth blasted Demary's spoon - a 7.91-pound specimen. Not wanting to press their luck, the pair quickly released the 2-pounder and raced back to the landing.

Demary and Logan only enjoyed their bragging rights for one week. The three-fish stringer record was broken for the fourth time in 11 weeks when Troy Brown and Rod Richard landed 25.14 pounds' worth of bigmouths, Brown landing a 9.76-pound lunker and Richard contributed a 9.45-pounder and a 5.93-pound fish. Their three fish averaged 8.37 pounds! A sudden summer thunderstorm may have aided their success by cooling the shallow, heated pool.

"We caught these fish in about 20 minutes right after a thunderstorm passed through," Brown explained. "After that, the fish shut down. That thunderstorm really helped us a lot. It dropped the barometric pressure and cooled the water drastically. They came out from under the cover. We were in the right place at the right time."

Brown and Richard fished one of three big, slightly deeper pockets on the western end of Lacassine Pool. Like the other anglers, they bounced heavy weedless spoons tipped with pork chunks over thick, matted vegetation to entice their bass.

"Those fish just blew up on that spoon," Brown said. "We really didn't need to set the hook, but just hold on. They didn't play around with it."

"We both dropped some big fish there before because we just couldn't get them out of the vegetation," Richard observed. "I lost another one that was easily as big as my 9.45-pounder before I caught that one."

By the time the pool closed for the season that October, many anglers couldn't reach some of their prime honeyholes; they would kick up mud in the usually deep boat trails. In fact, the fishing probably exceeded all expectations, because the shrinking pool concentrated fish into fewer areas.

The water in the pool had reached a critically low level by the spring of 2000. Except for the perimeter canals, the pool shrank from nearly 16,000 acres to a few hundred acres, and most of those remained choked with vegetation. Refuge officials cancelled the traditional March opener, but allowed bank-fishermen to probe the perimeter canals.

With the fish corralled into the shallow canals, the bank-anglers landed many a lunker, some bringing in bass in the 5- to 7-pound range, a few catching specimens exceeding 10 pounds. With water levels dropping each day, refuge officials encouraged the bank-anglers to keep anything they caught.

"We watched people pulling out fish all up and down the bank," said Maurice Fontenot, who caught an 8-pounder on opening day that year. "We saw stringers of 10 bass averaging 3 to 4 pounds. It wasn't uncommon to catch 40 or 50 bass."

The extremely shallow water remaining became unbearably hot, and lacked dissolved oxygen; it caused the fish to jam themselves into constricted pools in which trophy bass became easy prey for turtles, raptors, minks, raccoons, cormorants and other predators. Vegetation thickened in many normally wet areas, turning parts of the impounded marsh into practically dry prairie reminiscent of something one might see in Kansas.

"It's extremely low," Grafe said in 2000. "We have the lowest water we've seen historically. Now, the pool averages about 1 foot deep. When the water was pulled down to a few deep areas, the alligators, birds and otters cleaned up. I imagine we had some fat critters out there."

By the time rains refilled the pool in late 2000, little more than a ring of water remained in perimeter canals. On May 7, 2001, Lacassine Pool reopened to boaters after 19 months; the water level stood at about 3.8 feet. Refuge officials delayed the March opener to give the surviving bass more time to spawn without interference.

However, most of the giant bass had disappeared. During the worst of the drought, refuge biologists saw hundreds of dead fish, including many huge bass, on muddy banks, and an untold number were devoured by predators in the preceding year and a half. So it was that in 2001, Lacassine Pool anglers had to release everything they caught immediately.

When the rains again filled Lacassine Pool, state and federal officials began an intense restocking program. First they released bream to serve as forage fish; then they stocked hundreds of thousands of pure Florida bass fingerlings, and annual stockings continue. They also stocked catfish, crappie and redear sunfish (better known in south Louisiana as "chinquapins").

"We are decimated out there," Grafe said in March 2001. "We did a two-day shocking effort and only found six bass; the largest was 13 inches. Most of the bass were in the 4- to 5-inch range. In a similar shocking in 1998, we found 78 bass ranging up to 11 pounds."

In May 2001, concerned bass fishermen using private funds stocked more than 50,000 pure Florida-strain largemouth bass fry into the pool. However, it takes years to grow an 11-pound bass.

A few monster bass survived, growing fat by eating their trapped brethren. In 2001, anglers reported catching an occasional bass in the 4- to 8-pound range. However, most fishermen had to work hard and cover plenty of territory to land three or four bass in a day.