From my understanding Choke got more than enough rain to fill this summer, but they let water out as it was filling up to keep the flow down to the bay.
This is 100% false. Where do you get your facts from? Nearly 100% of the bay inflows this spring and summer were met from the nueces/lake corpus.
Most people have little understanding of the hydrology of these systems. Choke canyon is a huge volume with a full capacity at 695,271 ac-ft (currently 303,558 ac-ft). It also has a small watershed that happens to cross a large aquifer recharge zone of the carrizo wilcox aquifer. The Frio watershed just simply has not caught the amount of water needed to fill the lake. 2500 cfs is simply does not much for rising the lake. 2500 cfs even for a full 24 hrs is only 4,950 ac-ft!
All these rumors about where water goes are nonsence, just look up the acutal numbers.
http://www.nueces-ra.org/CP/CITY/passthru/index.php If you will notice I said "from my understanding" I offered no facts. With all your wisdom please explain your link, no units anywhere. Also whatever is realeased from choke winds up in the Nueces river correct? And flows through Lake CC no? I'm not being a smart arse, i'd be happy to learn something. I however know that choke received large amounts of rain in areas that would have brought water to the lake and the lake had either zero change or in some cases went down afterwards according to the level monitoring site I was watching.
Forgive me if I sound harsh, but there are too many misnomers about water in general but especially choke.
The units on the link are listed at the top of the table but most all volumes are in Acft (=325,851 gallons), which is the unit we use in water resources. For choke you want to look at inflows from the Frio and San Miguel. And yes releases from choke are on there too. Easily the number 1 consumer of water on choke is evaporatation (it's a windy desert), which is also in the table. Yes I know the table is confusing, but it has a lot of data. Also at the top of the page you can go back to any date and see, probably the last day of the month is best, because it lists everything in MTD.
Anyway if you really want to know more I can point you to other data.
Source: I'm a hydrologist from a different area with personal interest (fishing) here