Last week Jesse Pond caught a 28 pound striped bass near Forgotten Canyon at Lake Powell. His father, Sean, posted this account of the epic battle in the Anglers' Corner section on WaynesWords.com. He posted 2 photos, one of which is shown here. Below we give excerpts from his account. It is worth reading the entire post.

While traveling west over Eisenhower tunnel and over Vail pass everyone looked at us like we were crazy for having our boat in tow in January. as we headed out of Grand Junction Colorado into the Utah Desert the outside temperature was 7 degrees Fahrenheit and my wife started to believe I was crazy too……….

The next morning we slept in until about 9AM, grabbed a quick bite and headed back to the off shore marina to look at the house boat, when we finished our houseboat tour we made it back to the Boat inspection station about 11AM and it was 43 degrees, sunny and no wind, once the inspection was complete we hit the boat ramp to launch and realized there were only 2 other trucks in the parking area, we had the lake all to ourselves!

Jesse had been bugging me to fish so I finally gave in and rigged up his and my poles with a couple of cast masters and trolled all the way out of Forgotten Canyon with no luck, as we reached the main channel I rigged up 2 poles with leaded line , mine had a Rapala CD9 and was out 7 colors, I set Jesse up with a Storm Thunder stick in green and let him out 8 colors and settled in behind the controls, I varied our trolling speed between 1.5 – 2.3mph on my GPS, about 15 minutes later we had just turned into the main channel towards Bull fog when Jesse Yelled “ DAD, I HAVE A SNAG” I looked at the fish finder and said Jess we are 200 ft deep , that’s not a snag, HOLD ON!

some 20 to 30 minutes later with the fish actually coming our way he must have been able to see the bottom of the boat because he dove straight down and hard! It pulled Jesses rod so fast the handle was forced into his groin, Jesse yelled and fell forward , I grabbed Jesse by his hoodie with my left hand and his pole with my right, feeling the weight of this fish...

Once the fish was in the boat we snapped bunch of pictures and decided to head to bull frog marina and get it weighed. The post office scales were all that we could find and it showed about 27 ½ pounds. We froze Jesse’s fish that night and upon return to Bailey Colorado my wife had it weighed at our local Safeway and it came in at 28.31 lbs.