I was at bbr in the 70's. used to put a nickel in old man Allens wooden box and hop on one of his horses and go perch jerkin on horseback in the water. almost forgot about those days.

Jimbo its funny that you say grass is a major factor today and I know it is but back in the 60'/early 70's nobody had heard of hydrilla.
We had things like duck weed, moss, lily pads and cattails for vegetation.

Best days ever.

Fayette County Lake. Over 100 in a day over 5#. Top5 went over 45#
Conroe 34# got us second in the Sunday tournament. Caught another 4 30# stringers that day.
Fork on a Jackall Mikey swim bait. Wrecked the 5 and 6 pounders during the Shad Spawn.

Worst days.....plenty of zeroes.

100 over 5 lbs in a day? Must be a record! Dang, wish I could have fished Fayette when that was going on.

Guerrero early 90's, big numbers and big fish. Spinnerbaits, lizards, cranks and caught my first bass on a swimbait there in 1993.
9" AC Plug fire tiger pattern, 9lbs 13 oz and a looong fish.

Fork, first trip there was early April 1990. You had to be there.
Had a tap on a 6" red shad Culprit worm on a point in about 7' of water. Set the hook hard and the stump didn't move. Then it started swimming off and broke my 20 lb test in the trees like it was nothing.
Numerous other ones that got away stories on that trip. That timber and big fish was a tough combination. I should have quit my job and just fish Fork from 1990 to 1993.

Amistad several years back (has it really been over a decade?, ouch) when it was red hot. The big fish ate swimbaits, jigs and senkos like candy. It was so awesome to see those big fish hit swimbaits in that clear water.
I saw many giants swimming in California waters but one of the biggest bass I ever saw, looked every bit of 20 lbs, was at Amistad. I only saw her for a couple of seconds and she disappeared , blended in with the depths.

Falcon a few years ago. Every day hooking at least a couple over 8. One day I fished a point at the mouth of Tigers. I called it the magic point. baitfish stayed on the point, bass would have baitfish jumping and skipping on the surface, then a big boil. Throw what you want. I never left the point until near sundown when a wildlife and fisheries boat pulled up next to me and ruined the bite.
I loved throwing jigs and chatterbaits on that lake.

Conroe - Pre Asian carp days with hydrilla
Livingston - '72 - '80 North of 190 bridge
Amistad

Toledo Bend 70's & 80's, Palastine 70's, Sam Rayburn 90's. And a close #4 would be Richland Chambers in the 90's. And I'd love to experience any of it like it was then 1 more time , before I have to check out.

Fork
Falcon

Austin with milfoil in the 70s-90s.
Austin with hydrilla in the 90s-00s.
Georgetown when it first opened in the early 80s.

Lake Austin from 2006-2013 before I moved away. Back in 2006 you would only see a handful of bass boats even in the spring. Almost everyone was fishing Travis I think. The fishing really started to take off in 2008-2009. More and more people were starting to fish it but the fishing was just getting crazy good. So good that I always felt my chances were pretty good of catching a DD bass even in the middle of the dog days of summer. I’d put the boat in the water and just feel all of that electricity and energy tingling through my body. Feel really lucky I had the chance to live 15-20 mins away from that lake and fish it 2-3 times a week sometimes the last 3-4 years I lived in Austin. Not sure i’ll ever have that kind of fishing again in my lifetime with an amazing lake that close to my home.

Monticello take 30 # to win. Every time the club fished it we broke another club record. Great smallmouth fishing too.

Fawn Lake was loaded with 8 # plus bass. Until a guy started potting it for his dinner. I'll bet I caught over a hundred of them, but all of mine were catch and release. Or I caught the same 8+ 100 times.
Caught 1 that went 9 on a mechanical scale. At the time the state record was just over 10.
Also saw the biggest alligator snapping turtle in it. Probably went 2-300 pounds. Big as a saltwater turtle. Maybe a 150 years old. That year everything that floated on the water got eaten except the adult swans.

Cypress . Never got skunked on that lake. Just real good fishing except for the sand bass.

Stik Marsh
Fork
Champlain

Great post!

Looking back over the years.....
#1 is Brady, many 32-35lb. 5 fish days
#2 Fayette County when it first opened
#3 A small East Tx city lake that has to remain nameless to save it. Like Brady, many 35lb. days.

Missed Kurth in it’s prime but it’s still plenty good. Biggest fish ever came out of Hubbard Creek and my last thought is “Fork is a great place to meet people”.

Another one I miss was Farfield. Back when you could catch 20 or 30 Redfish and 20 or 30 bass in a day. That was fun too!

Lake Fork mid ‘90’s. In 1994 I was a freshman in college. Over spring break, my friend’s uncle took us on 3 or 4 day trip to lake Fork. It wasn’t the first time we had fished there, but it was our first serious multi-day trip there. We fished hard for the first 2 days in north winds without much action but when the weather warmed up the fishing exploded. This was the first time I learned to sight fish. My buddie’s uncle didn’t believe you could catch fish on the beds and told us we were wasting our time, so he fished out of the back of the boat with a sluggo while we concentrated on the shoreline. We caught a bunch of 2-4 pounders with several fish up to about 5lbs and had a complete blast doing it, but Uncle Doug stole the show with a couple of 7 and 8 pounders.

Lake Pinkston in the ’90’s. I started fishing Pinkston around 1986 or 87 right after the state record was caught there. The lake became well known overnight. We would put in at the upper end ramp and never fire up the big motor. We would troll through the stumps throwing rogues or long A’s along the laydowns and crush the bass from daylight to mid morning. After that we had a couple of creek channel spots where we could sit and catch fish after fish on TX rig worms. We came home from the previously mentioned Fork trip (1994) and went immediately out to Pinkston. After fishing for the pressured Fork bass it was like taking candy from a baby back on our home turf. There were tons of fish in the shallows – some areas had 20 bedding fish to cast at from one boat position. Pinkston’s bass population was like that for about 4 or 5 years and I don’t think it has ever been as good as it was in the mid to late ‘90’s. In spring of 1996, I caught a 9lb 12oz bass there, my personal best at the time. In the summertime, the bass would school in the main lake and it was not uncommon to see almost the entire area in front of the dam churned up with bass chasing shad. The hardest part was deciding which splash to throw toward. A clear topwater would catch plenty but not much size. A weightless bass assassin would catch the big ones if you were patient enough.

I guess looking back, I would say most of the east Texas lakes were great in the ‘90’s. Lake Nacogdoches probably has my other vote. We had some of the best night fishing trips there in the summer, dragging Carolina rigs around the hydrilla edges. You never knew what you were going to set the hook on. We caught lots of 6-8 pounders. Shhh, I’m not so sure its heyday is over….

Fork PB, roadbeds & humps with Zoom Fry crazy good times and night fishing wasn't bad either.
Monticello, had some stellar days 3 to 6 pound range
Gibbons Creek ,great numbers and a few good ones.
Squaw Creek before they closed it .some nice small-mouth too.

Tawakoni
Cedar Creek
Fork
Gibbons creek
Mill creek