All of that type of habitat — and more of it — is available at another state public lake managed by the MDWFP. A betting man would have to consider putting money on Lake Calling Panther, near Crystal Springs about 40 miles southwest of Jackson, as the state’s most likely public water to produce a new record.

It is a new lake, impounded in the last four years in the same type of fertile ground with almost identical topography to Natchez State Park. It covers nearly 500 acres, which is double Natchez Lake’s size.

“I don’t think there’s any doubt that it will grow bass in the record class,” said lake manager Kellum Herrington last November. “We’ve already got a lake record over 11 pounds, and I know one guy who is a great fishermen, who knows his bass, who said he had one on in October that would have been 13 or 14 pounds.

“He’s not the kind of guy prone to exaggerate, especially about bass. He hooked the fish on a Spook and had it on for several minutes before the fish broke the line.”

But even if the fisherman had exaggerated the size of the fish by as much as couple of pounds, Skains said, it is evidence that the lake is capable of breaking the state record within a year or two.

“The record is already over 11, so we know we have fish that big,” he emphasized. “We’re not guessing there. And the thing you have to remember is that those bass could not have been over 3 1/2 years old, because that’s the longest they could have been in there. We know that.”

Garavelli was quick to agree.

“If the lake can grow bass to 11 or 12 pounds in less than four years, the potential for what it can do in five or six years is — well, I don’t know that we’ve seen it in Mississippi. Maybe not even at Natchez in the first years after it was stocked.”

But Calling Panther is in a race. Since state records are not restricted to public waters, it is highly possible that the next state record will come from a “designer” lake — one of those private high-dollar lakes, heavily managed to produce quality bass.

Which brings us back to the Kentucky spotted bass record.

“I’d have to say that the next record would have to come from public waters, like a river,” Garavelli said. “I’m not sure we’ll ever see one that big from another farm pond.”

If indeed that’s even what happened the first time.

Nobody is questioning whether or not Grantham, of Seminary, caught an 8-pound, 2-ounce bass that day in 1975. The question is whether or not it really was a spotted bass. An attempt to find Grantham last year for this story was unsuccessful.

According to the agency’s records, the fish was never examined by a state fisheries biologist, which is now required of any fish submitted as a record.