Bass Bigger in Texas!

Shannon Tompkins for THE CHRON

We Texans tend to brag a lot about our state, and sometimes we can even back it up.
Here, at the start of the week in which we remember the Battle of San Jacinto, is a bit of Texas crowing: We have the finest largemouth bass fisheries in the country.
That covers a lot of ground, seeing as how largemouth bass are the most popular game fish in the nation and are found in every state except Alaska.

And, admittedly, there’s some subjectiveness in this claim. It’s hard to quantify “finest.” But by any measure, Texas can argue its largemouth fisheries are unmatched.
Access to the fishery?

We have more than 500 public reservoirs, every one of which holds these fish. And that doesn’t include the rivers and other public waterways that hold them. Almost without exception, any angler in Texas is within an hour’s drive of a healthy bass fishery. (Except, perhaps, for folks in the Trans-Pecos, where fisheries of any kind are a little thin. But even anglers in the farthest corner of the Panhandle aren’t that far from Lake Meredith.)

Abundance of fish?
Texas has dozens of lakes boasting bass densities and numbers as high as any in the country. Most states are doing good to have a dozen or more really good bass fisheries. We have scores of them.

Management?
The inland fisheries division of Texas Parks and Wildlife Department is largely responsible for the incredible bass fishery in this state, and its decades of cutting-edge management — from conservative bag limits to research and hatchery/stocking programs aimed at improving the genetics of largemouth bass stocks — are the envy of other state fisheries managers. We have incredibly smart, talented, dedicated and effective people, and it shows.

Sizing it up
But those things are, admittedly, open to debate. Minnesota has a lot of water, as does Florida and a few other states. Louisiana, Alabama, Florida and Mississippi waters can produce as many bass as Texas waters. And states such as Missouri have incredibly talented, progressive and well-funded fisheries agencies.
But there’s one area in which it’s hard for any other state to challenge Texas’ largemouth fishery: big bass (fish weighing more than 10 pounds).

Yes, three or four states have produced largemouths heavier than the 18-pound, 2-ounce Lake Fork largemouth that holds Texas’ state record for the species.
Georgia, which stakes claim to having produced the world-record 22-pound, 4-ounce largemouth, is one. But that fish was taken 78 years ago. A 10-pounder is a monster bass in Georgia these days.

California’s record largemouth is a 21-pound, 12-ounce fish. The state produces some truly monster largemouths, but they all come from a handful of small, deep, clear lakes that don’t support large populations of bass.
Odds are pretty good that more largemouth bass are caught from February through June on Sam Rayburn, Falcon, Fork, Choke

Canyon, Conroe, Amistad or any one of a dozen other Texas lakes alone than in all of California in a year.
Mississippi’s state record largemouth is an 18-pound, 15-ounce fish caught in 1992. And while Mississippi certainly has some fine bass fisheries and produces a good number of 10-pound-or-heavier largemouths, it doesn’t come close to Texas in overall quality and quantity of bass.

Florida has a great largemouth bass fishery. Its official largemouth record is a 17-pound, 4-ounce fish — almost a pound less than the Texas record.
The bigger the better

Here are some pretty telling numbers about Texas’ big-bass fishery:
TPWD maintains a list of the 50 heaviest documented largemouths landed in the state. The bass holding down the 50th spot weighed 15 pounds, 5 ounces.
That 15-5 is heavier than the state record largemouth in 36 states.
This past weekend, Texas’ ShareLunker program saw its 501st entry.

The ShareLunker program, which TPWD began in 1986, is the first of its kind. It solicits anglers who land a 13-pound-or-heavier largemouth to lend the live fish to TPWD for use in the agency’s fisheries research and hatchery production projects.
The idea is to integrate the genetics of these huge bass into the fish produced for stocking into Texas public waters, with the aim of spreading the genetic predisposition for top-end growth into the fisheries. (It works, by the way.)

Since the ShareLunker program began, 61 public waters in Texas have coughed up qualifying largemouths that have been donated to ShareLunker. One lake — Fork — has produced almost 250 of those entries.
So far during the 2009-10 ShareLunker season (fish are accepted Oct.1-April 30), 30 13-pluses from 13 different public reservoirs (and two private lakes) have been entered.
The heaviest of those 30 largemouths, a 16.17-pounder caught at Caddo Lake last month, is heavier than the state record in 39 states.

Every one of those Texas ShareLunkers is heavier than the fish holding the state record in 28 states.
The odds are good that somewhere in the state today one of the million-plus Texans who target largemouth bass will catch a 13-pounder.

Several will land a bass weighing 10 pounds or more. Most will catch a few bass, and many will catch a bunch.
And that — the very real possibility of an angler on any body of water in this state catching a huge largemouth and the near certainty of his landing at least a few — makes Texas stand taller than any other state in the world of bass fishing.
Having a state with the best bass fishing probably wasn’t on Sam Houston’s mind 174 years ago this Wednesday. But he’d probably be proud about it. Texas anglers should be, too.
shannon.tompkins@chron.com