A smallmouth bass guarding a bed in seven feet of water at Lake Sammamish ate the same hand-tied fly, from the same angler, three times in eleven days. The third encounter was the one that counted, and it has now been approved by the International Game Fish Association.
Chris Senyohl, 58, who runs Intrepid Anglers Guide Service, found the fish on May 12 while fishing the 4,900-acre lake at Bellevue, Washington, with friend Tom Wolf.
"I first saw the fish and caught it on May 12 while fishing with Tom Wolf," Senyohl told Outdoor Life. "It was near a bass bed in 7 feet of water and I cast to it with a rabbit strip sculpin minnow fly that I tied."
At better than seven pounds it was an outlier for a state with no reputation for oversized smallmouth. He released it, then went looking at the numbers.
"After I released it I checked the IGFA records and the measurements and was shocked that the bass could have been big enough for an IGFA catch-and-release record," he said. "I knew her true overall length from that first encounter with my measure net."
What followed was less about catching the fish than documenting it properly. A week later, fishing with his wife Laney, he found the bass on the same bed and caught it a second time, now with an official IGFA measuring board on hand. The photographs failed. On May 23 he went back with Laney and Wolf, carrying the board and a clear container he built himself — a photo box, based on the tanks biologists use to examine fish without harming them.
"She touched glass on both ends of my photo box which is 22.5-inches inside diameter," he said. "We had to get her onto the IGFA board and measure the length from the fork of the tail to its nose. We had to close its mouth for that measurement, and she didn't like that."
In its July 2026 approvals, the IGFA listed the fish at 53 centimetres — 20.86 inches — tying the All-Tackle Length Fly world record for smallmouth bass. Outdoor Life reports it also ties in the wider all-time length category. Ties are routine in length records, where several fish share a mark, rather than being separated by ounces on a scale.
That points at a broader shift. Senyohl's bass appears in a July class made up almost entirely of measured-and-released fish: Bob Gaines' 83-centimetre Pyramid Lake cutthroat trout, taken on a beetle fly in March; Sam Aslop's 92-centimetre crevalle jack off Hobe Sound, Florida; Derek Loe's 61-centimetre kelp bass off Santa Monica, caught on a swimbait alongside guide Oliver Ngy. All four swam off. Only Will Hefley's 72-pound, 9-ounce Pacific black snook from Quepos, Costa Rica was weighed on a certified scale.
Montana Outdoor, writing up the catch, had fun with the idea of a fish that fell for the same trick three times, but landed on the same point: the record-holder is alive, and Senyohl has been back to check on her.
He returned in late June without fishing for her.
"She was still there, though I didn't try to catch her," he said. "I know it was the same bass because she has a roughed-up pectoral fin that's easy to identify and her color pattern is recognizable, too."
It is reasonable to point out that a bedding fish caught three times in under a fortnight is telling you something about the fish as much as the angler, and that a weight-record chase would have ended with this bass on ice. This one ended with her back on the bed, identifiable by a scarred pectoral fin, and an appointment for next spring.