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Jack Naylor, Apple Valley: 21¼ inches, 6 pounds, smallmouth bass, Lake Superior:

The first week of June, friend Ron Bukovich and I traveled to Chequamegon Bay, Wis., to see if we could catch some of the huge smallmouth bass this water is famous for.

We found small areas holding fish in 2 to 3 feet of water.

The bass hit on Texas-rigged tubes, and 4- to 5-inch stick worms.

I used a medium spinning rod and 8-pound test line, and had all I could handle with these very heavy, thick-bodied fish.

I caught two personal best that were each over 21 inches.

This one was 21¼ inches, and weighed 6 pounds.

All fish were released.

Nice picture at the link...
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BOSTON - A 50-ton bowhead whale killed off the Alaskan coast last month had a weapon fragment embedded in its neck that showed it survived a similar hunt -- more than a century ago.

Embedded deep under its blubber was a 3½-inch arrow-shaped projectile that has given researchers insight into the whale's age, estimated at 115 to 130 years old.

"No other finding has been this precise," said John Bockstoce, an adjunct curator of the New Bedford Whaling Museum.

Calculating a whale's age can be difficult, and it usually is gauged by amino acids in the eye lenses. It is rare to find one that has lived more than 100 years, but experts say the oldest have been close to 200 years old.

The bomb lance fragment, lodged in a bone between the whale's neck and shoulder blade, was probably manufactured in New Bedford, on the southeast coast of Massachusetts, a major whaling center at that time, Bockstoce said.

It was probably shot at the whale from a heavy shoulder gun around 1890. The small metal cylinder was filled with explosives fitted with a time-delay fuse so it would explode seconds after it was shot into the whale. The bomb lance was meant to kill the whale quickly to prevent it from escaping.

The device exploded and "probably hurt the whale, or annoyed him, but it hit him in a nonlethal place," he said. "He couldn't have been that bothered if he lived for another 100 years."