Justin Rogers hauled in the next-to-last Arkanssas Legacy Lunker during the 2026 contest period, but that didn’t matter when it came to the winning draw for a $75,000 21-foot Xpress bass boat. Rogers possessed the winning cup with the key to the boat on Oct. 29 to come away with the grand prize after being one of 18 anglers to catch and donate lunkers to the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission’s Black Bass Program.
All the anglers who donated their fish to the Legacy Lunker program’s 2026 donation season were honored Oct. 29 at the End of Year Legacy Lunker awards banquet, organized in coordination with the Arkansas Game and Fish Foundation at the new North Little Rock Event Center in the Argenta Arts District. Every table was filled; a raffle benefiting the Arkansas Outdoors Hall of Fame with several outdoors packages, guns and fishing rods and reels kept attendees focused to the very end; and two of the state’s avid professional anglers, Stephen Browning and Fred “Boom Boom” Roumbanis, professed their admiration for the AGFC’s fledgling trophy bass program during a presentation with the AGFC’s Trey Reid, Black Bass Program Coordinator Jeremy Risley and Xpress Boats President Rory Herndon.
The program, designed to boost the potential of Arkansas’s home-grown trophy bass combined with cutting-edge research and technology, unveiled some drama in the run-up to drawing the grand-prize winner of the initial Legacy Lunker donation season, which ran from Jan. 1 to March 31…