A last-second repositioning before lines-in handed Kirk Falls of Shavan, Louisiana the biggest day of his fishing life on Lake Fork. The Louisiana angler weighed a 10.76-pound largemouth in the 9 a.m. hour to take home the 2026 Mega Bass — the world's richest one-day big-bass tournament — picking up $15,000 and a new Skeeter ZX200 powered by Yamaha.
Falls was tipped onto the starting zone by a friend who had fished it four weeks earlier, but an encroaching boat that cut him off in the dark forced a fresh look at the shoreline. He ended up further down the bank than he had planned.
"I'm kind of thankful at this point that he did that," Falls told Bass Champs host John McCalmont on the Doc Talk podcast. "We went back on the bank a little bit further than I would have probably not gotten there at the time I did. If that would not have happened, I wouldn't have caught the fish."
The winning presentation was a ChatterBait pitched to a tree in three feet of water. The bite was modest — nothing dramatic — and Falls only realised the scale of the fish as it approached the boat and rolled on the surface twice. His brother, who has netted Falls's only other double-digit bass more than 15 years ago, was on the net again.
"Holy crap," Falls said. "I knew it was a money fish, for sure. I knew it was going to be over." The 10.76 was the biggest bass of his life and the tournament's eventual winner.
Over 1,450 anglers fished the event, which pays $15,000 for the hourly big bass and $500 for 15th place. Falls said he refused to start spending the prize money in his head until the day was out. "Dude, I ain't won this boat yet," he told friends who had already started asking what he would do with it. "I don't want to talk about this until it's time to talk about it."
Second place went to Justin Williams of Temple, Texas, who nearly threw back the 15.5-inch fish that ended up winning him a brand-new Kubota Sidekick. The fish weighed 2.94 pounds — comfortably above the 2.30-pound cut for hourly money — and came on a paused jerkbait fished in about 10 feet of water, a sight-fished reaction bite after his partner had caught one off the same tree on forward-facing sonar.
"She had a belly on her," Williams said. "The lakes that I fish back at my home lakes, we don't have chunks like that." Williams walked away with $2,000 and the Kubota side-by-side — a strong runner-up bag off a fish he had almost left in the livewell because he did not own a set of tournament-grade boat scales. He does now. "I'm a scale guy," he admitted on stage. "That's what I do for work."
