Hey all.
So I was fishing in zone 20 today off an area in Oshawa and I was "foot trolling" and when I get to the end I get a hit. A nice big slam off the Wally diver and it's still a bit away so I'm not sure what I have on the end. A few big head shakes and I'm still not sure. An "older" fellow is there seeing what's going on and comes over. After a few min. fight I see the biggest small mouth I have ever seen! I win the fight and get it landed and think to myself, zone 17 bass is closed get it back before someone asks to keep it or I get in trouble for OOS fish" So I unhook this monster using the boka grip (as some my know I messed up my hand recently) and have a quick look at it (5.5LB on my BAD scale) and toss the fish back in. The older fellow looks to me and says "that was a keeper why did you toss it back?"... I said bass is OOS here now so I had to no matter what and that's why I took care of the fish so quickly and didn't take any pic's so I wouldn't have issues".
So I get home and check my reg's for zone 20 to find out I could have taken more time with the fish and got a few pic's as it's not OOS yet! ARRGGHH!!!! And when I said "bad" scale, my boka type scale is very light to the fish's weight on a good scale. I had a 5LB walleye on this scale that read just under 4 LBs but when on 2 other digital scales was in the high 6 range...
I'm not mad that I let the fish go at all, just mad with myself for catching my largest bass of my life yet with nothing to show for it other than fish smell...