Weather Plays Role In Down Season For ShareLunker Program
(Courtesy Photo/TPWD)
YEAR’S BEST: Tyler’s Brett Harris earned a Texas lifetime fishing license after catching the biggest ShareLunker for 2007-08, a 14.5-pound fish from Tyler State Park Lake. Here Harris releases his fish back into the Tyler State Park Lake.
The 2007-08 Budweiser ShareLunker program has come to a close and a low number of entries is a greater indictment on the weather conditions than the state of Texas bass fishing.
Although the first fish showed up in January, a 13.06 from Lake Conroe, the program sputtered all spring before ending April 30 with just 13 entries from 10 lakes.
There were three entries from Lake Fork and two from Falcon Lake. There was one each from Amistad, Sam Rayburn and Toledo Bend, but the remainder of the list included some surprises such as Richland-Chambers, Waco, Casa Blanca and Tyler State Park, the smallest lake that produced the biggest entry. Tyler’s Brett Harris, using a swim bait, caught a 14.5-pound bass on the state park lake in March. Along with a replica mount of the bass, Harris will also be given a lifetime fishing license for catching the biggest bass of the ShareLunker season.
The 13 bass taken into the hatchery program this year are well off the almost 21-fish annual average and is the lowest participation since 2002-03 when just 10 bass over 13 pounds entered the program. It is also the third overall smallest number behind the five entries in 2000-2001, when some lakes around the state were recovering from Largemouth Bass Virus, and 1986-87, the program’s first season when eight entries were recorded.
The decline has not created an immediate concern within TPWD.
“The weather plays a big role in this,” said Phil Durocher, TPWD’s Inland Fisheries director. “Whether they get real active depends on the weather. It is like the rut with deer.”
This year’s program had seven entries between March 9-17 and three between April 1-5. In between cold weather, including some heavy rains, returned to the state. At Lake Fork, Sabine River Authority officials were forced to open flood gates during that period, and on that lake falling water often translates to slower fishing.
“There is no reason to believe we have fewer Lunkers out there. That is a rare catch anyway,” Durocher noted.
Harris’ bass, which has spawned twice and produced 31,000 eggs at the Freshwater Fisheries Center in Athens, is the second entry from Tyler State Park. The other, the former lake record, was a 13.28-pound bass caught in 2000 by Brad Sharp of Tyler.
Jeremy Bruton’s 13.05-pound fish was the fourth ShareLunker entry from Richland-Chambers. The Blooming Grove fisherman’s bass has spawned four times, producing almost 79,000 eggs. The program annually averages just four spawns, making this year’s program more efficient.
Some fish from these spawns will be grown to six inches before being stocked as part of the Operation World Record research study. Others will grow to normal fingerling size with some being stocked in each of this year’s participating lakes, including Tyler State Park.
The story behind Harris’ fish is that bass in the state park lake have received a steady diet of rainbow trout each winter since the 1980s. In the case of Bruton’s Richland-Chambers bass, the fish had to overcome habitat obstacles to reach the super trophy size.
“When you stock a fingerling you have to ask two questions, where is it going to live and what is it going to eat?” said Richard Ott, TPWD district fisheries biologist from Tyler. “At Richland, habitat has been poor all along; very little vegetation and turbid water.”
Ott explained that fingerling survival on the lake is poor in most years because of the lack of vegetation. Adding to that is that Richland-Chambers food supply for young bass can also be limited.
“When bass fingerlings switch from invertebrates to fish at about 4 inches in length the best forage is translucent bluegill fry. The problem is that turbid water without vegetation produces very few bluegill fry — hence the problem. Once the bass grow to a size where they can eat shad, they have all kinds of prey, but they still have to survive the first month or so after stocking, and get through that bottleneck.”
Besides Harris’ bass being a lake record at Tyler State Park, Ricky Culverhouse’s 13.87 from Lake Waco was also a record catch.
It was also the first Budweiser ShareLunker from the lake.
After this season Lake Fork has now produced 239 of the programs 454 entries. The next closest is Lake Alan Henry with 25, but it was shut out this year.
Sam Rayburn now has 23 entries, Conroe 12, Falcon nine, Amistad eight, Casa Blanca five and Toledo Bend four.
In April, Pamela Plummer of Fort Worth became just the fourth woman to donate a ShareLunker to the program when she caught a 13.11 pounder on Lake Fork.
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