Here we go .... passing judgement on someone who has done nothing illegal..
I see this post being closed soon .......

They were there two day ago again with a boatload.

I certainly hope so!

This thread is not to discuss what is legal now. Let's leave that out of the picture. It's to inform anyone who would like to express there opinions on protecting fish of lake Tawakoni of a good place they are able to do so.

Let's keep it civil guys.

years of noodling and seeing how most females don't even spawn out after the spawn ... the ones that spawn out are the larger females and the males that protect those eggs are usually over 15 lbs. The smaller females are either rejected by the big males or something but go out in june and work your way around the banks and see just how many little fish are on nests and you won't find any. Even channelcat here in oklahoma are never smaller than about 8 lbs and it takes a long time for channels to reach that size. They have to be mature before they can spawn and the fish in keystone and kaw grow faster than anywhere else in oklahoma... they did a 4 or 5 year study on the fish shocking up thousands and aging them and weighing them and found that in keystone and kaw they grow from 1 to 1.3 lbs per year. Every female I've cleaned after July still had their eggs in them that was less than 15 lbs and if they don't spawn by mid June then they start to re-absorb their eggs and no telling how long that takes ... couple years maybe because you can see re-absorbtion taking place at all different stages through the year .. some will be pink and almost gone by this time of year and some will still have fairly large sacks of eggs that are being re-absorbed so I think that takes a long while because they don't just dump them if they don't spawn. The few larger females I've cleaned due to receiving a mortal wound to the gills will have a fresh developing batch of eggs growing by now... nice and yellow and plump. Same with the males. You can tell which ones actually guarded eggs after July .. they'll be all beat up and have sores on their heads where their heads have been rubbing against rocks or whatever they spawned under.... and they'll be thin with muscle deterioration with larger heads than what looks normal .. the blue males under 15 lbs look normal and haven't gone through any rough treatment from spawning and guarding the nests. If it takes them that long to become mature enough to raise young then they're removed from the system in large enough numbers then eventually you'll have a lake just like keystone ... nothing but 4 lb fish in 2010 and if there were larger fish there I would have seen them on my side imaging sonar. I'm fairly adept at finding fish in any lake that I go to ... even lakes I've never fished before ... if the fish are there then I've already got a good idea of where to start looking just by the conditions and layout of the lake and then when I start looking I can see them.

All this stuff going on down in texas doesn't effect me but I've already seen the effects of overharvest up here in OK... less than 1% of our population of bluecat is bigger than 30 inches. This was the statistic given by ODWC Oklahoma dept of wildlife after they did their 5 year shocking study. If it can happen here in OK then it can happen anywhere. If your wildlife people can set limits to match places like Alabama and other states like that then you guys wouldn't have to worry about being able to catch large fish because they would be abundant. I always thought that ya'll had larger fish because catch and release was a lot more the norm down there but it seems as though you guys are having the same problem now. People too greedy to see 5 or 10 years down the road when they can't catch larger fish just because there aren't any more. Someone on this thread said that Ray hubbard was lacking in 40 lb'rs now. When I fished it in that NTTC tourney that one year I couldn't believe how many fish was in there but that was like 6 or 7 years ago now.

Around here these idiots will jug and trotline for several weeks and if they catch a couple of bigguns and don't want to clean them they'll look for people to give them to instead of turning them back ... like they've got some kind of grudge against those fish and they shouldn't be allowed to live. It's totally ridiculous the way people think when it comes to this stuff... like that one dude saying it's the guides fault for the demise ... that's just silly because all the guides that I've heard of in texas throw back everything over 10 lbs. that type of harvest doesn't hurt a fishery .. it helps it. Just wait and see ... if you guys don't work together on this then your lakes will be like oklahoma lakes ... less than 1% of your fish population will be over 30 inches. Those that want to kill everything they get their hands on will soon not be able to get their hands on anything to kill.... mark my words .. when Tiny's gone in a couple or ten years you can look back and say ... well I guess ole Tiny wasn't kiddin about this stuff ... I can't find any fish other than these little dinks.

you're sure right about that river, Grand lake used to be like Texoma but it's pretty much wiped out now of big fish just like keystone and several other lakes. Eufala is the biggest man made lake and it was a fisherman's dream and now you can't hardly find anything but small fish in it. It's almost like fish greedy folks and fish sellers will wipe out the resource and then move to the next lake setting up their freezer trailers ran by portable generators and then leave nothing for anyone else. One dude up on Kaw a couple years ago boasted to a friend of mine he had 2800 lbs of fillets and still had two more freezers to fill ... I asked my friend why he didn't turn the guy in and he said I didn't know he was doing anything wrong ... I asked my friend "how many limits can you have in your possession?" he looked at me bewildered and said nothing and I said you can have only two limits in your possession and if those fish weren't 200 to 300 lbs each then I'd imagine he was over his limit. He would have lost his vehicle and all his equipment to boot if he'd have been caught. That's what needs to happen to those rascals.

Tiny do you think part of that is the drought and zebra mussels?

the drought had some to do with it but the decline happened long before they went up river in 2010 .. once the drought hit they never came back, what few was left anyhow. The drought had nothing to do with other ok lakes decline because the others don't have large tributaries like keystone as most years the blues spawned locally in grand, eufaula, thunderbird, oologah ... all those lakes don't have tribs like keystone and they've been wiped out of big fish as well. Soon kaw might be on that list too. When I posted on my web site about the decline of fish in keystone and that I'd not be guiding there any longer lots of folks that used to fish keystone followed me up to kaw and put a lot of pressure on kaw for a time. there's still lots of keystoners that fish kaw now but not as many as when I posted where I fished ... I don't do that any longer on my daily fishing results ... most of the time it doesn't say where I'm at and that's for a reason. because when I post good reports the pressure on the lake will increase over 3000% sometimes. I've even went so far as to lie about where I was at just to keep pressure off of the lakes I fish.
Zebra mussels ain't ever gonna hurt the blues in oklahoma ... don't seem like they're a problem anywhere as the blues keep them thinned out or something does.. they just don't seem to do well up here for some reason

Am I missing something or isn't the proposed idea for regulations just for the protection of the larger trophy sized fish? I don't think anyone wants to stop you or me from bringing home a mess of eating size fish.

OMG!! Thank you. Someone actually read it and then commented.

River, there is no limit on the number of poles you can have out. The only limit is not more than 100 hooks in the water. They could make an impact on jugs and trotlines by dropping that number significantly, the problem then becomes the ability to enforce. Just seem there are not enough game warden to do the job.

I wonder if this is ever gonna go any where's Just cut the limits back I would think best

These fish sellers here would run up to 10 100 hook snaglines and to make them appear legal they'd put their kids names on them, their cousin's names, their dead uncle's names and there was like 8 of them doing it at once... here in ok you can run 20 jugs per person with 5 hooks on each but they were more successful running the snaglines because they would catch fish like crazy and they'd leave the set for up to 3 days before they'd check them. What this does is when they catch a few fish on the line then those fish would attract other fish into the area and then the fish that are attracted to the struggling fish would hit anything in the area and usually that was just a shiny hook. When they'd leave them set for 3 days they'd come back to almost every hook having a fish on it. They'd check their lines until they had their limit and then they'd go clean them and then go back out and check more then clean then check then clean until all their lines were ran. They'd then go sell their catch at the local bars and some restaurants would purchase fish from them and then three days later they'd start all over again. One of the restaurant owners would bypass the sellers and do this himself... he told me that he sold catfish dinners and a thursday night buffet I think it was but he wanted me to take him on a learning trip so that he could catch fish on rod n reel until it was time to run his lines. I told him that that's illegal and I wouldn't have anything to do with it... he said well I won't sell the fish we catch on our trip. I said then that if I even suspect that you're a fish seller you won't be going out with me. Another guy I knew real well told me about his operation when he seen me releasing fish below keystone dam saying I should give those fish to him because he sells them.. he's the one that told me he put other people's names on his snaglines and told me how many he ran and all that. He also said he knew of several other guys that did it the same way. This was around 1995 when he told me about this stuff and before 1993 you could expect to catch at least one 30 lb fish out of keystone every time we went and that was without these high dollar electronics we have now. When I started guiding on keystone in 2005 we caught 5 fish total over 30 lbs ... that's how much keystone declined in big fish population in just a little over a decade. These guys don't pay any attention to rules and regs. It's impossible to catch them too because the wildlife dept don't seem to be able to catch them even if they're told these guys are doing it. Maybe it won't happen down in texas but it seems like it might be going on if those guys are going back as many times as ya'll have stated. If it is happening then there's not much you can do to prevent it.

How will that help trophy fish in Tawakoni?

You missed the sarcasm. Read my post before the one you replied to. My point is its all about the guide making money. I've been fishing Tawakoni since salsa was a twinkle in his daddy's eye. The numbers are not declining. He would just like to protect what he considers his resource.