As a kid, I was lucky enough to have access to fish a private pond owned by a man who raised fancy ducks. It seems that the bass were eating too many of his ducklings and he asked me to keep all the bass I caught. My top lure was a 8 inch long jointed pike lure. I caught a fair-sized bass for New England (16 inches) and when I got it in, I found that the bass had two baby ducklings in it's stomach and one in it's gullet that it didn't have room for, yet he still took the largest lure I had in my tackle box. As an adult fly fisherman, I once was playing a bass that was around 14 inches long. The water was very stained and when I got the fish near the shore, he made a dive towards the bottom. When I tried to ease him up, he got rather heavy. I figured that he had buried himself in weeds, however, when I eased him to the surface, a very large 12-13 lb bass had over half of him in her mouth. She spit him out when she saw me and slowly swam away. Needless to say, I didn't have any flies that could match what she was looking for. They are called large mouth bass for a reason.

Jim Smith