Bainville man breaks state white bass record for third time
When Vernon Pacovsky checked his setline on Oct. 13, he knew he had a good fish on the hook. And when the Bainville angler saw it was a white bass, he suspected he had a new state record.
Pacovsky knows something about state fish records – and specifically about white bass records. He has held the state record twice, and when his most recent catch was certified last week by Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks, he was awarded his third state record. The 17-inch fish weighed 2.80 pounds, shattering his former record by a little over a half pound.
Pacovsky was fishing a reach of the lower Missouri River south of Bainville, generally the same location where his two previous state-record white bass were caught, when the latest white bass bit a fathead minnow on his setline. Pacovsky had already caught a ling, a sauger and channel catfish, but when he pulled the bass up the bank he immediately headed to Sidney to certify the fish’s weight.
“When I pulled the setline, I could tell it was bigger than the bass I have mounted at home,” said Pacovsky. The fish was weighed on a certified scale, statements were obtained from witnesses and this week FWP awarded Pacovsky his latest state record. Pacovsky caught his first state-record white bass in 1997 with a fish under two pounds, then followed it with the 2.25-pounder in 1998.
Native to the southeastern United States and related to ocean-going striped bass, white bass are not stocked or managed in Montana. A small population of the bass occupies the lower Missouri and Yellowstone rivers just inside the Montana border, probably moving seasonally upstream from North Dakota’s Lake Sakakawea where white bass are managed as a game fish. Rarely white bass move up the Missouri River as far as Fort Peck Dam.
“I’m always surprised to catch a white bass, but they are out there, mainly in the spring and fall,” says Pacovsky. “I can’t be the only one catching them. I suspect people catch them but don’t know what they are.”
White bass are pale in color with seven black or olive-gray continuous longitudinal stripes along their sides. Like other members of the bass family, white bass have spiny dorsal fins just in front of and separate from a second soft dorsal fin. Spring spawners, white bass eat minnows as well as aquatic insects, crayfish and zooplankton.
Pacovsky thinks white bass over three pounds are probably finning in the Missouri, but the 79-year-old angler is not sure the next state record will be caught by him.
“I’m getting to the age where I don’t get around much,” he says. “I had to quit hunting and I’m about to the point where I may quit fishing, too.”
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