Guys,
In 32 years, I've never seen a "native" strain largemouth bass larger than 7 pounds. Ever.
In my professional opinion, there's no reasonable chance of growing a double-digit bass without Florida genetics.
For example, the ShareLunker program was mentioned in Scott's post above. Of the 500+ giant fish donated to that program over the years, every one of them has Florida genetics of some sort. 51% were pure strain Florida bass and the rest are some Fx cross.
Comparatively, the lakes where these fish are caught typically have less than 5% pure strain Floridas in the populations as a whole.
By the way, the ShareLunker program takes bass 13+ pounds.
