Falcon Lake back at fishing forefront

Recent tournament shows lake is again a hot spot for bass

AUSTIN — Falcon Lake already had begun to drop when Jim Cox hooked his monster fish.

TEXAS PARKS AND WILDLIFE (enlarge photo) Scott Campbell of Springfield, Mo., landed this 13.13-pound bass at Falcon Lake during last weekend's BASS tournament.

Located on the Rio Grande near Zapata and below Lake Amistad, Falcon is a pass-through lake for irrigation farmers down in the Rio Grande Valley. By 1994 the lake was dropping sharply, a decline that eventually reduced it from about 80,000 acres to just the river channel and a few thousand acres.

Cox, then a writer for Texas Parks and Wildlife magazine, was fishing a deep-diving crankbait on a point close to the dam. The fish kind of floated toward the surface and rolled on to her side to give up, easily a 15-pound fish if I had ever seen one.

Guide Gene Naquin and I were reaching for nets and cameras when Cox, who lived to fish, suddenly, and out of fear, gave the crank bait a huge jerk that snapped it from the fish's jaws. "I'm sorry. I just panicked," said a slack-jawed Cox.

We caught some other fish that morning, including one 8-pounder, but nothing close to that lost 15-pounder. And then the lake went dry. Not that day and not completely, but slowly and surely over the next couple of years.

From the mid-1980s through the mid-1990s, Falcon may have been the best bass lake in the country. Lake Fork in East Texas and a couple of California reservoirs were turning out some of the biggest bass in the world at the time — including a pair of Texas state-record fish from Fork, which left Falcon to quietly produce the largest tournament stringers in the state, an impressive number of quality fish that many anglers may have doubted.

Until they fished there or local tournament results proved otherwise. If an angler didn't come to the weigh-in with at least 30 pounds for a five-fish limit, he was wasting his time.

But the lake, and businesses in the area, suffered mightily during the next 10 years. It became difficult just to get a boat into the lake because all the ramps were out of the water.

However, by 2004, the Valley was wet again with spring rains, and Falcon began a slow rise.

With last weekend's BASS tournament at Zapata, Falcon would appear to be back at the pinnacle. About the only BASS record that didn't get broken was the single-day, heaviest five-fish string, but that was challenged. Anglers and tournament organizers were crowing about the quality and numbers of big fish that were weighed in during the event.

The numbers tell just how good fishing was over the four days at Falcon:

Paul Elias won the event, shooting to first place on the final day with a catch of 37 pounds, 11 ounces. That gave him a four-day total of 132 pounds, 8 ounces, shattering the old four-day total of 122 pounds, 14 ounces on California's Clear Lake.

Elias averaged 6.225 pounds for his 20 fish for the week.

Second-place finisher Terry Scroggins lost by just four ounces, becoming one of the 12 final-day anglers to exceed 100 pounds for their four-day totals. Scroggins almost beat the one-day record of 45 pounds, 2 ounces by weighing in 44 pounds, 4 ounces, almost a nine-pound average. And Scroggins reported losing a 10-pound plus fish late on his final day.

Even sixth-place finisher Scott Rook beat the four-day record weight with 125 pounds, 10 ounces of fish.

And pro angler Scott Campbell of Springfield, Mo., caught a 13.13-pound bass that was turned over to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department's Budweiser ShareLunker Program.

"The tournament was just awesome," said Phil Durocher, head of Freshwater Fisheries for Parks and Wildlife. "The people, the businesses are jumping up and down. The same thing happened at Amistad last year, and they're still getting people down there fishing. There will be people coming from all over the country."

Durocher pointed out that in 2004, Falcon Lake was down more than 50 feet, existing only in the old Rio Grande channel. "It stayed that way for years, but those fish didn't just grow up there in three years," he said. "Those big fish were there all along. There's lots of shad and lots of forage there. Some of those guys were culling 30 pounds of fish every day."

Of course, all the big fish and all the attention will bring new fishing pressure, Durocher said. However, Falcon is a huge lake and can take some pressure. Biologists also will monitor the lake for any signs of over-fishing.

"Our guys work Falcon every year," Durocher said. "If the fishing starts to decline, we'll take a look at it, but those border lakes tend to be boom or bust (depending on water levels). We had a wet year last year, and I can't imagine it ever having been better than it is right now for the quality of the fish."