but you can pick on a old man.

Here is a post I made earlier this year on the same topic. This is just my opinion on what happened.

I am not a biologist, but I am a logic thinker with an over-analyzing engineering mind, so here is my honest opinion. When the lake is drawn down 60 ft, you are making essentially every bass locate and reducing the amount of shoreline in the lake. When this happened, you now have less shoreline cover for baitfish to hide in and less cover for bass to relate to. This makes the baitfish an easy target to predators so the baitfish population drastically declined due to a higher number of bass in a more concentrated area of the lake with exposed baitfish. During this period of the drawdown, a large population of the bigger fish moved offshore and suspended over deep water in search of a better food source that they didnt have to compete with the smaller fish for (tilapia). When the baitfish in the shallower water became hard to find, these bass had to eat the smaller bass to live and this reduced the population of bass, along with the population of bass that die due to the stress of overcrowding and relocation. This is natures way of restoring the fish populations to equilibrium based on the size of the lake and available forage. So now we have a population of bass that is proportional to the amount of shoreline cover and baitfish in the lake. Well then you add 35 feet of water to the lake. This increases the amount of shoreline and the amount of cover for bass and baitfish to live in, while not affecting those suspended fish nearly as much. So those suspended fish dont have any reason to rush back into shallow (thats relative) water, and they are hard to catch as we know. The reduced population of baitfish have tons of cover to hide in, and the smaller population of bass along the shoreline bunch up into the most ideal structure and cover places they can find. This leaves us where we are today with a smaller population of bass altogether in more condensed areas around the lake (leaving alot of "dead" water), baitfish that are less exposed due to more habitat to live in, and a higher number of fish suspended in really deep water that are almost inaccessible to anglers. The lake needs time to get back to equilibrium, and the only thing that can speed that up is a stabilized water level and the growth of grass. I look at it like this: go hide a dozen easter eggs in a double wide trailer and see how long it takes your kids to find them. Then take that same dozen easter eggs and hide them in the White House and see how long it takes your kids to find them. Well thats what happened to these fish when the lake level rose 35 feet, those fish moved from a double-wide into the White House. Now go find them.

Amistad sums up the current state of fishing in texas. A shell of it's former self.