Angler's Nightmare: Lake Of The Ozarks Man Eats A $100,000 Fish

When a $100,000 fish is on the line, there's bound to be a big-fish story attached to it.

So this story, from 2024's Spring Big Bass Bash on Lake of the Ozarks, would feel like a whopper, if Chris Larkin didn't have the photos to prove it.

The Big Bass Bash, held twice a year on Lake of the Ozarks, draws thousands of anglers all hoping to catch the biggest fish of the weekend. The single largest fish wins the angler who caught it $100,000.

(To register for the upcoming tournament, Oct. 4-5, 2025, click here.)

On the first day of the two-day tournament, Chris Larkins spotted a monster bass hanging out near the bank, and he knew he just had to catch it, and he'd win.

“I knew it was a winning fish,” he told LakeExpo.

His instincts were right: the 7.98-pounder would have been the biggest fish weighed-in at the Big Bass Bash in more than a decade of tournaments, and bigger than the next-largest fish caught that weekend, a 7.63-pounder.

Tragically, Larkins’ fish would never touch an official scale, and he would go home empty-handed.

Try, Try Again

While fishing along a shoreline on Saturday, April 20, 2024 Larkins saw the monster, lurking just below the surface. The bass was spawning on a gravel bed, shallow enough to be seen without the use of a fish finder.

Larkins resolved to hang at that spot for the rest of the weekend, until he caught that fish.

With his 21-year-old son using the trolling motor to hold the boat in place, Larkins worked lures past the fish for two hours. Then, finally: a bite.

He reeled in the lunker, his son netted it, but before the celebration could begin, his son observed, “Dad, it’s outside the mouth.”

Tournament rules specify a fish must be hooked inside the mouth for it to be a legal catch: snagging a fish anywhere outside the mouth would disqualify that fish from being a legal catch in the tournament, and it must be released.

Larkins knew he had to let the fish go.

“You gotta do the right thing,” he said. Plus, anglers who land big fish at the Bash are subjected to a polygraph test before they can get their prize money.

So they weighed the fish and confirmed what they already suspected: this was a giant.

7.98 pounds.

They took a photo and then, painfully, Larkins and his son put the bass back in the water.

Chris Larkin - 7.98 Pound Bass Large.jpeg

It swam back to the spawning bed, and Larkins started casting again.

The pair spent another hour and a half at the spot, determined not to lose this fish. And then, he caught it again. Larkins says he saw the fish take the lure, and he set it.

They reeled in the fish, his son netted it, but incredibly, when they hoisted it into the boat, they saw the fish had been foul-hooked again.

Incredulous, Larkins returned the fish to the water a second time. By this point in the day, he knew it was too late to try and catch it again: the last weigh-in of the Bash is at 3 p.m. But the tournament runs for two days, so Larkins resolved to return first-thing Sunday morning and spend all day catching that fish.

He never got the chance.

Larkins said a couple of men had been standing on a nearby dock, watching him reel in the monster. They exclaimed in shock over the size of the fish, and then asked Larkins why he had thrown it back.

He explained his reason — trying to do the right thing — and also explained to the men: “That’s a $100,000 fish.” He begged the men to leave the fish alone, telling them it would win him the tournament if he caught it the next day.

“I shook that guy’s hand on his dock,” Larkins recalled. “And he assured me that he would not mess with that fish nor tell anybody that it was there.”

That night, while scrolling Facebook, Larkins’ heart sank into his stomach. A photo posted to a local Facebook group: one of the two men, holding that very bass, with the caption, “We caught this 7.9 lb large mouth bass in about 2ft of water by our dock today!”

Sunday morning, Larkins and his son made a beeline back to that spot, hoping against hope that the fish might still be there. Maybe the guys had thrown it back.

As he trolled around, scouring the area for the fish, one of the men came walking down to the dock.

Larkins told the man he had seen the photo from the night before.

“I said, ‘Don’t tell me you filleted it.’ And he goes ‘Well. I didn’t fillet it. But my buddy did.’”

The fish of a lifetime, and one that would have won Larkins $100,000, had been eaten by those two men the night before.

Larkins admitted: he blew a gasket. “It wasn’t pleasant,” he said, “I will tell you that.”

“He’s like, ‘Oh it was the biggest fish he’s ever caught!’ And I’m like, ‘Well take a picture of it!’” Larkins recalled.

After the exchange ended, Larkins said he was approached by some crappie fishermen whom he had seen in the cove the day before. One of them told him, “I watched you shake that guy’s hand… and I promise you that you hadn’t even left the cove before they went and caught it.”

Talking about the incident a few days after the tournament, Larkins said he was still pretty sick over the whole thing.

“Around here, a 7.98 is honestly a fish of a lifetime,” he said.

Yet despite the way things turned out, Larkins says he doesn’t regret doing the right thing and throwing the fish back when he had foul-hooked it. “Yeah it stung a little bit,” he said. “I would just hope that everybody else out there that would have caught it like that would have done the right thing and released it.” And while he knows there's no guarantee the fish would have been on that bed the next morning, he thinks there's a good chance it would have been. He didn't get a chance to find out.

As for the two men on the dock, Larkins acknowledged they had just as much right as anyone else to catch that — or any other — fish. But he added, “It wasn’t right, what he did there.” He said in retrospect if he had known they wouldn’t honor their agreement to lay off the fish, he would have offered to split some of the winnings with them.

Big Bass Bash organizer Charlie Terrell said he spoke with Larkins about the incident, and he felt terrible for him. “Chris could have tried weighing that in. But he did the right thing two times… and goes the next morning and it’s been in the skillet,” Terrell said.

Larkins says he’ll likely be back to fish in the fall Bass Bash. When asked whether he’d be avoiding “that” dock, he laughingly replied, “I actually would fish around his dock and catch everything I can and take and release it in another part of the lake.”

The man who posted the photo of the fish later removed the photo from Facebook. LakeExpo contacted him for comment but he has not responded, so we have decided to preserve his anonymity for this story.

The amateur-only Big Bass Bash is the most popular fishing tournament at Lake of the Ozarks, drawing thousands of anglers and paying out hundreds of thousands of dollars, twice a year.