Big Bass on Lures

This is the size of bass that i like to catch, they are a stocky powerful fish and can be caught around Cork harbour. The best time to catch fish of this size is when the herring are in, normally around November, December. My best days fishing for quantity and quality were both in December, one just inside Cork harbour and the other in Garretstown. The big bass was caught on the fly on the 9th of December on a dirty wet morning and there were loads of mullet being pushed up into the shallows.I used a mullet pattern surf candy fly which has an epoxy head on it and i find them easier to cast in bad weather because they rarely wrap-up when fishing. The bass took the fly and about eighty yards of backing on the first run, i thought i had hooked the bass by the tail because i couldn't stop it.The next few runs took more line and i must have had about 150yds of line out so i walked along the shoreline to retrieve as much backing as i could and to get a different angle on the fish. Eventually i got the bass in and put the boga grip on her mouth but i couldn't lift her because the boga grip started to tear the fishes mouth. I had to lift the fish by the tail and the boga just to get it out of the water, i weighed the fish and it surpassed my scales of 20lbs easily so i don't have an exact weight but it was well into early twenties. I took over ten minutes sitting with the fish before she was able to swim away strongly on her own and i thought to myself that she must have been over thirty years old, that is the biggest bass that i will ever catch in my lifetime. If i had killed the fish it would have been the biggest bass ever caught on fly but i'm into catch and release and get more enjoyment on seeing fish swim away to fight another day.