Pennsylvania pro Dave Lefebre catches seven bass weighing 31-3 – including 9-3 largemouth – to earn $100,000 for victory and $100,000 Berkley Big Bass

OCALA, Fla. (May 21, 2026) – Erie, Pennsylvania’s Dave Lefebre never publicly announced whether he’s retired as a professional angler. He’s not sure if Kubota Heavy Hitters Presented by Bass Pro Shops will mark his last event.

But this much is clear: He saved his best performance for what was likely his final Bass Pro Tour event.

Lefebre not only topped the field on Florida’s Orange Lake to win the Heavy Hitters championship belt and $100,000, he also caught the Berkley Big Bass during the Championship Round – a 9-pound, 3-ounce lunker – to earn a second $100,000 paycheck. He’s now the second angler in the history of Heavy Hitters to walk away with $200,000, joining Jordan Lee at the inaugural Heavy Hitters event in 2020.

Lefebre’s total of 31 pounds, 3 ounces on seven scorable bass topped Ron Nelson by 3-12. His first Bass Pro Tour win and first national victory since 2015 just might go down as a storybook ending to his 23-year pro career.

“It’s been an emotional, spiritual battle for the last five years,” Lefebre said. “And it feels like God’s way of telling me I’m doing the right thing by getting out – going out this way.”

Rallying to make the Championship Round
With three FLW Tour wins and a victory at the 2009 Toyota Texas Bass Classic, Lefebre has enjoyed plenty of success during his career. But it had been a while since he even found himself in contention to win a top-level tournament. Before Heavy Hitters, he’d made just two Top 10s and never finished better than seventh in 50 Bass Pro Tour events. He failed to requalify for the tour in 2026 and hasn’t fished any other tournaments this year.

Still, Lefebre earned a spot in Heavy Hitters thanks to his big-bass success a year ago, and he arrived at Orange Lake optimistic. He used to fish the lake often with his late friend Glenn Browne, who passed away from cancer in 2019, and he felt like it would be fitting to end his career on a high note.

“I knew the potential that it was the end, the last one, and I just have learned how God works,” he said. “And I needed it.”

Practice buoyed Lefebre’s hopes. While he didn’t get many bites, he did discover a pair of spots about a quarter mile apart that he thought could be the winning areas if he got them to himself. Sure enough, no other boats tried to fish them during Group A’s first day of qualifying … and yet Lefebre only mustered two scorable bass for 6-4.

“When I didn’t catch them, I felt like I let the spot down,” he said. “Like, I’m in the winning spot, and I sucked that bad.”

Still, he stayed positive. He described the spots as ditches located at the mouth of a big bay. The first deep water outside of the bay, which had become choked out with hydrilla due to Orange Lake’s low water level, he figured the area would continue to replenish.

“Everybody I talked to, I said, ‘I’m going to bust them tomorrow,’ because I’m figuring it out a little bit at a time,” he continued. “They’re there. I just gotta slow down.”

Lefebre started his second day of qualifying by “running around helter-skelter” in an effort to find new, productive water before forcing himself to return to the spots where he’d spend the rest of the event. He switched from a white swim jig, which had produced all his bites during practice and Day 1, to a black-and-blue bladed jig. He also swapped out his braided line for 20-pound fluorocarbon so he could feather the bait more slowly around the hydrilla clumps. He promptly caught an 8-3, followed by a pair of 5-pounders.

“I went back in there and just drifted with the wind instead of using the trolling motor – just Florida stuff, doing what you’re supposed to do,” Lefebre said. “I started making shorter pitches and just letting that ChatterBait flutter, and that black-and-blue one was the deal.”

While Lefebre knew he’d figured out something special, he still had to rally to make it out of the Qualifying Round. He caught a 6-3 with about 30 minutes left on Day 2 to finally climb above the Lucas Oil Cut Line. But with a couple minutes before lines out, Takahiro Omori caught a 6-pounder of his own that knocked him back out. Lefebre landed a 3-5 on his literal last cast to extend his final event – the first of three straight days with clutch catches in the final period.

“I just swung it in like it didn’t matter,” Lefebre said of his Day 2 buzzer-beater. “I didn’t even know that I had fallen (out of the cut). But I fell to ninth, and then that 3-pounder I swung in put me back to eighth, and I didn’t even think I needed that fish. And then yesterday, in the Knockout Round, same thing as today – I caught like a 7-something with an hour and a half, two hours to go, and the fish just shut down.”

One bass worth $200,000
Lefebre once again flirted with the cut line during the Knockout Round, squeaking into the Championship Round field in eighth. Still, he remained confident. He noted that, even as impressive as the quality had been on Orange Lake, bites weren’t easy to come by. No one appeared likely to build a big lead and run away with the win. He was also interacting with a lot more fish than SCORETRACKER® indicated.

“I knew what the potential was,” Lefebre said. “I lost seven fish the first day, 20 (in the Knockout Round) and more than 20 today. I would just miss them a lot more than I’d catch them. Just stupid stuff – stuff you shouldn’t be able to overcome.”

Ironically, one of the few times during the event that Lefebre felt like his chances had slipped away came early in Period 3 on Championship Thursday. He’d hung around by boating a 3-pounder roughly every hour. Then, when he finally got a bigger bite, the fish came off. He then hooked and lost another one around 5 pounds.

“I was devastated,” he said. “Like, I waited all day for that bite. Then I stood up, made two casts, saw that 5-pounder; it ate. I was like 9 pounds back at the time, I think. And I was just like, ‘Man, I just blew it.’”

A couple casts later, Lefebre caught a 3-9. Then another that didn’t quite make the 3-pound minimum weight. Then, he connected with the 9-pounder – the biggest bass Lefebre has ever caught in a tournament, and certainly the most lucrative.

He admitted that he probably should have lost that fish, too. But this one stayed hooked and proved to be worth $200,000.

“I’m kind of out of fishing shape,” he said with a chuckle. “I sat down in the driver’s seat, and it was coming at my hand, and I had a little too much line. I couldn’t make a mistake. My arms were stretched as far as I could. It was just crazy. I barely got my hand on his face because I let too much slack in.”

Suddenly leading both on SCORETRACKER® and in the Berkley Big Bass standings, Lefebre found himself choked up. He called the last 2 hours the most stressful experience he’s ever had in a tournament.

“When you win something like this, you want to run away with it,” he said. “You don’t want the stress. I lost 15 years off my life today.”

When his victory finally became official, Lefebre teared up again. He needed this, he said. He and his wife are working to open a music venue and café in his hometown of Erie, Pennsylvania, and financing the project had been stressful.

“There’s just a lot at stake right now,” Lefebre said. “It’s a big investment. We’re turning the chapter, next page. So, we needed some breathing room. We didn’t get a loan yet, stuff like that. We needed a little bit of breathing room to do what we want to do.”

A $200,000 payday should help. Meanwhile, tasting victory one more time – and winning both of the coveted prizes on offer at Heavy Hitters at that – will make for a fitting ending should Lefebre indeed decide to retire as a touring pro.

The final 10 pros at Orange Lake at Kubota Heavy Hitters 2026 Presented by Bass Pro Shops on Orange Lake finished:

1st:        Dave Lefebre, Erie, Pa., seven bass, 31-3
2nd:      Ron Nelson, Berrien Springs, Mich., five bass, 27-7
3rd:       Jake Lawrence, Paris, Tenn., four bass, 24-2
4th:       Mark Davis, Mound Ida, Ark, five bass, 21-1
5th:       Marshall Hughes, Hemphill, Texas, three bass, 18-7
6th:       Alton Jones Jr., Lorena, Texas, three bass, 10-2
7th:       Brent Ehrler, Redlands, Calif., two bass, 7-2
8th:       Bobby Lane, Lakeland, Fla., one bass, 6-3
9th:       Cole Floyd, Leesburg, Ohio, one bass, 3-1
10th:     Jeff Sprague, Wills Point, Texas., one bass, 3-0

Full results can be found at MajorLeagueFishing.com.

Overall, there were 32 bass weighing 151 pounds, 12 ounces caught by the final 10 pros on Thursday, which included one 9-pounder, two 8-pounders and three 7-pounders caught from Orange Lake.

Berkley Big Bass Bonus Award Winners:

Group A Day 1: Takahiro Omori, Tokyo, Japan (10-1), $10,000
Group B Day 1: Michael Neal, Dayton, Tenn. (11-0), $10,000
Group A Day 2: Ott DeFoe, Blaine, Tenn. (10-1), $10,000
Group B Day 2: Michael Neal, Dayton, Tenn. (9-8), $10,000
Knockout Round: Jake Lawrence, Paris, Tenn. (9-8), $30,000
Championship Round: Dave Lefebre, Erie, Pa. (9-3), $100,000

Hosted by the Ocala/Marion County Visitors and Convention Bureau, the Kubota Heavy Hitters at Orange Lake Presented by Bass Pro Shops featured the MLF catch, weigh, immediate-release format, in which anglers catch as much weight as they can each day, while also feeling the pressure and intensity of the SCORETRACKER® leaderboard. A bass must have met the 2-pound minimum weight requirement for a bass to be deemed scorable in the Qualifying and Knockout Rounds, and in the Championship Round a bass must have weighed at least 3 pounds to be deemed scorable.

To qualify for Kubota Heavy Hitters, the weight of an angler’s single-largest bass from each event of the seven 2025 Bass Pro Tour events was recorded. The 32 anglers with the heaviest total from those seven bass qualified to compete in this event.

Television coverage of Kubota Heavy Hitters 2026 Presented by Bass Pro Shops will be showcased across six two-hour episodes, premiering at 7 a.m. ET on July 4 and running each Saturday through Aug. 15 on Discovery. New MLF episodes premiere each Saturday morning on Discovery, with re-airings on the Outdoor Channel.

Proud sponsors of the 2026 Kubota Heavy Hitters Presented by Bass Pro Shops include: Abu Garcia, B&W Trailer Hitches, Bass Force, Bass Pro Shops, Berkley, Black Buffalo, BUBBA, Grizzly, Kubota, Lowrance, Lucas Oil, Mercury, MillerTech, NITRO Boats, OFF! Deep Woods, Onyx, O’Reilly Auto Parts, Power-Pole, Ranger Boats, Star brite, Toyota, YETI, Yuengling and Zenni.

For complete details and updated information on Major League Fishing and the Bass Pro Tour, visit MajorLeagueFishing.com. For regular updates, photos, tournament news and more, follow MLF’s social media outlets at Facebook, X,  Instagram, Rumble and YouTube.

About Major League Fishing
Major League Fishing (MLF) is the world’s largest tournament-fishing organization, producing more than 250 events annually at some of the most prestigious fisheries in the world, while broadcasting to America’s living rooms on CBS, Discovery, Outdoor Channel, VICE, World Fishing Network, RFD-TV, Game & Fish TV and Rumble, and on demand on MyOutdoorTV (MOTV). Headquartered in Benton, Kentucky, the MLF roster of bass anglers includes the world’s top pros and more than 30,000 competitors in all 50 states and 20 countries. Since its founding in 2011, MLF has advanced the sport of competitive fishing through its premier television broadcasts and livestreams and is dedicated to improving the quality of life for bass through research, education, fisheries enhancement and fish care.