

Those were the days when a bass weighing more than 8 pounds was considered rare.īy 1975, Kemp proudly told a gathering at a Cowtown 100 Bass Club meeting, "It will not be long before catching a 10-pound bass in Texas will be common." Kemp's idea was that the fingerlings not only would grow faster and larger than the native Texas strain of bass in each of those lakes, but also breed with the native bass and produce larger Florida-native Texas bass hybrids than most Texas anglers had ever caught. Kemp took it upon himself to travel to Florida to obtain a few containers filled with Florida bass fingerlings and bring them back to Texas to stock in five small lakes. Most veteran anglers agree that Texas' swing toward better managing of its fisheries resources began in the early 1970s when the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department's inland fisheries division was under the direction of Bob Kemp. Also required for that achievement is innovative and sound fish management. New waters, however, don't always spawn great fisheries. With that boom of water bodies in mind, it should not be difficult to see how the stage has grown even larger for today's bass anglers. Later came the fantastic bass factories of Lake Fork, Monticello, and others of the 1980s.

Factor in the arrival of even larger reservoirs such as Toledo Bend, Sam Rayburn and Lake Amistad in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Texas' bass-fishing explosion didn't stop there, however.

You can imagine how these new reservoirs spurred the interest in anglers as the bass in these new reservoirs grew into feisty battlers. Among them came the building of lakes in the Fort Worth-Dallas Metroplex such as Benbrook, Whitney, and Lewisville.

Most anglers spent their efforts on small city or county-build reservoirs that were built primarily to provide water for local towns and cities.Ī series of floods in the 1950s, however, brought about the building of larger reservoirs and levees to contain or route future flood waters away from municipal areas. Prior to 1950, there were few large reservoirs in our state to provide great bass fishing.
