Rains end drought - turn Texas lakes into bass fishing paradises
Articles at FishingPoints.com
Texas droughts are a bad deal for just about everybody. The worst droughts occur in west and south Texas where huge reservoirs suffer precipitous drops in water level. When the rains finally come, however, game fish in old impoundments get a new lease on life, and so do anglers.
Two recent examples are O.H. Ivie Reservoir, east of San Angelo, and Falcon International Reservoir, south of Laredo. Both lakes have produced big bass this year for Texas Parks and Wildlife's Toyota ShareLunker Program.
On Jan. 16, Ben Blaine of Merkel caught a 14.02-pounder from Ivie. Just three days later, Zapata's Bryan Aubin landed a 14.40-pounder from Falcon. Two days later, O.H. Ivie produced another ShareLunker, this one a 13.09-pounder caught by Eden's Wesley Pullig.
Blaine's fish was the sixth ShareLunker from O.H. Ivie but the first since 2002. Bobby Farquhar, the regional fisheries biologist who monitors O.H. Ivie, said low water plagued the lake from the late 1990s until 2004.
"There were lots of adult bass in the lake, and they produced strong year classes of offspring in 2004 and 2005," said Farquhar. "We've been expecting it [the big bass]. About six or seven years after the end of a drought, you usually see the big fish start to come out."
It's no secret that lakes are most fertile when they're new. Rising water floods standing vegetation and provides forage fish and small bass a place to hide from larger predators.
When lake levels decline in a drought and stay low for extended periods, new vegetation grows in the moist soils around the declining reservoir. Rising water floods the vegetation, creating a new lake effect.
Nowhere is the new lake effect more obvious than at Falcon. When full, the lake covers 78,000 acres along the Rio Grande drainage at Zapata. Falcon is famous for yo-yo water levels, however. The same drought that plagued O.H. Ivie left Falcon at record low water levels.
The big lake caught water during abundant rains in 2004 and again in 2008, when it completely filled. It's like a new 78,000-acre lake.
"There was tremendous bass production in 2004 and 2005, and those fish are growing really fast," said Randy Myers, TP&W biologist for Falcon.
"In most lakes, it takes 10 to 12 years for a bass to grow to 13 pounds. Two years ago, Falcon produced a ShareLunker that was only 7 years old."
Giant fish represent a tiny percentage of the overall bass population, even in ideal situations such as Falcon and Ivie. Where most bass anglers are concerned, a bigger story is the huge numbers of five- to 10-pound fish being caught at Falcon.
The national spotlight shone on Falcon when the world's best anglers congregated there in the spring of 2008 for a Bassmaster Elite Series tournament. Records were shattered. Mississippi's Paul Elias won the event with 20 fish that weighed 132 ½ pounds, but he beat the No. 2 angler by only four ounces and the No. 3 angler by nine ounces.
The top 12 fishermen in that event all had weights of more than 108 pounds. Fishing was so good that pros who failed to make the final day cut didn't pack up and leave, as they normally do when eliminated from a tournament. They stayed and fished for fun.
Falcon has produced 11 ShareLunkers, four since 2008. I'm betting the lake will produce more big fish in the next 30 days. When Aubin caught his 14.40 pounder at 9 a.m. Jan. 19, the water temperature was 60 degrees.
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