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Mark Freeman's Commentary Record bass was the Silver lining Kevin Silver is as new to fly-fishing as the next guy, if the next guy also happens to be a short-order cook who has spent all of four months learning the ways of the compleat angler with limited hand-me-down gear and a box of store-bought flies. "To be honest with you, I don�t know much about fly-fishing," confesses Silver, 34, of Portland. "And I know even less about fly-fishing for bass." Now Silver is a certified expert, with the Master Angler patch from In-Fisherman Magazine to show it. But more impressively, Silver owns Oregon�s new state fishing record for smallmouth bass, and the short-order cook succeeded in one tall order by setting the record with a fly rod. Silver used a store-bought woolly bugger and 6-weight fly rod on Henry Hagg Lake near Forest Grove to hook and land a smallmouth bass that weighed 7 pounds, 14 ounces. That�s five ounces heavier than the old state record, also caught at Henry Hagg Lake in 1997 by a seasoned basser. Silver hooked the 23�-inch bass while float-tube fishing Oct. 8 and let it tow him for several hundred yards before he could take his tiny trout net and shovel the plump bass onto his lap. During his 45-minute tug-of-war, Silver broke one of fly-fishing�s most important rules for fighting big fish � he stripped and released line only with his hands, never using the drag on his fly reel. But this none-the-wiser fly neophyte broke the record nonetheless. "Like I said, I�m new to all this," Silver says. "And I wasn�t even fishing for smallmouth, to be honest. I was just fishing for anything that would bite." His record was officially certified last week by the Oregon Bass and Panfish Club, a Portland-based fishing club anointed by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife as the keeper of the state�s warmwater fishing records. "For someone to break the record is great, but for someone to catch a record bass on a fly rod is quite unusual," says Bob Judkins, the club�s contest director. "Real good bass fishermen can fish a lifetime and not catch a bass like that." "That�s being in the right place at the right time," Judkins says. "And it just goes to show you that you don�t have to be an expert fisherman to catch the big fish." Without knowing how right he was, Silver picked early October as a good month for smallmouth � and the no-wake zone around the shores of Henry Hagg Lake to become an expert. It was just his fourth time fly-fishing the lake, using on old Garcia rod, floating line and an old Pfleuger reel handed down by his father. Silver was catching and releasing bass and trout for half a day before he stripped about 40 feet of fly line out and slowly finned his float tube backward toward his car parked near a boat ramp about 100 yards away. "All of a sudden, I felt this weight hit it," Silver says. "The fish jumped, I saw it was huge and started shouting and hollering." Silver believed the bass was a largemouth, which are larger than the smallmouth. Silver held the rod in his right hand, looping the line through his index finger. He also kept hold of the line with his left hand, letting it stream out when the fish ran, and stripping excess line onto his lap as the bass crept close. "Luckily, I kept a lot of slack on my lap," Silver says. It doesn�t take commanding knowledge of Izaak Walton�s 1653 fishing bible, "The Compleat Angler," to realize that Silver had broken one of angling�s golden rules for catching big fish on flies. Most big-fish anglers will say it�s important to get the excess line reeled in immediately. That way, the reel�s drag system will let line out smoothly when the fish makes a run. Doing so would have reduced Silver�s chance of breaking his 5-pound leader tippet, developing a fatal knot in the pile of excess line or giving the fish an opportunity to spit loose his fly with erratic line pulls. But Silver just clamped down and let the fish tow him around. Eventually, the tired bass dove deep right beneath Silver�s float tube. When he pulled it up the first time, he tried to net him but failed. On a second pass, Silver simply used the net as a shovel to flop the bass onto his lap. "I was like, holy hell, this is a smallmouth," says Silver, realizing the fish might be close to a state record. Then he reached into the bass� mouth, and his size No. 8 woolly bugger slipped free with ease. "It was loose enough that a chill went down my spine," Silver says. So he finned to shore and drove quickly to a nearby market, where the fish was weighed on a certified scale. The market men mistakenly told Silver the fish was a few ounces short of a record. "But that was OK," Silver says. "It was a big enough thrill just to catch the fish." The next day, he took the big bass to the bar where he works, showed it off to a few friends and then committed big-bass sacrilege. "I filleted the fish," Silver says, "and cooked some of it right there." A few days later, he checked with ODFW biologists about the state record, and only then learned that the remnants of the fish then in his refrigerator was a new state record. Judkins� group used the certified scale weight, a picture and signatures from witnesses verifying the weight to anoint Silver�s bass the new record. Now, only a few photos of this fish remain for the record. "And I got my Master Angler patch from In-Fisherman Magazine," Silver says, "and that�s pretty cool." (Staff writer Mark Freeman covers the outdoors for the Mail Tribune. 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