You can be sure anglers will be catching bass like this beauty all year at Lake Castaic. Photo by Chris Shaffer

Last spring, anglers around the globe focused on Southern California when San Diego County resident Mac Weakley caught and released a 25.1-pound largemouth bass in Lake Dixon, a small 76-acre park lake near Escondido.

Although the fish was weighed on a digital scale and not a certified scale, it was the largest bass ever recorded in the world. The fish gained So Cal and worldwide attention and would have likely been a world record, had it not been snagged with a jig.

Since the fish was foul-hooked, and since Weakley didn’t take the required measurements of the bass, his fish wasn’t submitted to the International Game Fish Association for world-record status.

In accordance with California law, a fish not caught legally in the mouth must be released. Although it was reported that the angler first claimed the fish was mouth-hooked, Weakley released the fish anyway.

The record books will still show George Perry’s 22 1/4-pound bass caught in 1932 in Georgia’s Montgomery Lake as the world record.

Weakley’s fish, however, is proof that Southern California has the ingredients to yield the next world record. While other places on the planet have the ability to produce record-size bass, there’s no other spot that produces as many big bass as Southern California.

Is 2007 the year that someone finally displaces Georgia from the ranks as the world’s biggest bass producer of all time? In Weakley’s claim, we have a very good indication that at least one fish bigger than the current record is lurking here. On the other hand, catching that fish is another story.

“My thought is that I don’t anticipate a world-record fish being caught this year, even at Dixon,” said Mike Giusti, a California Department of Fish and Game biologist. He said the odds of catching that fish again, in the exact same condition, are pretty slim.

“It’s possible, but I don’t count on it,” he said. “I don’t think the record will be broken in the next five years. I don’t want to dismiss the possibility of a world record, but we have to be realistic. It’s not likely.”

Southern California has two strains of bass, Florida and northern strain. Barring a miracle, only Florida strain fish have the ability to grow to world-record proportions. The largest of the species are the females. It’s rare for a male to reach 15 pounds. Females carry the most weight in the spring when they spawn. Hands down, if a world-record bass is caught, it will likely be during the spring months, before late April.