So are we declaring it dead too

Dropping every day as they pump water. Talked to a fellow TFF’er and he said it’s still 6 feet below the ramp.

As a mostly kayaker, I am smiling as I type this.

So you can fish out of a kayak???

I just looked and the website still says "Not open for recreation"

Dont get caught.

Is the lake level suppose to be all the way to Bonham spillway?

Not yet, but I have the feeling that boats will be able to launch from the short ramps maybe 3-4 months a year.

So let me ask if the lake fills up and they allow people to start fishing are they going to shut the lake down when it gets back below whatever level it has to get to open?

Since they built the ramps so shallow it will likely have to be shut down once the water falls 3-4 feet low.

I will guess that you can still bank fish/float tube/and such with the ramps closed.

So the engineers screwed the pooch, is that the idea

I think it’s by design.
They knew what they were doing with those baby Trex arm ramps.
The regulations/limit rules on that lake and laughably short ramps all appear to restrict, and almost eliminate warm weather tournaments.

I talked to a civil engineer about it and if it lost water level to just the pumping from month to month it would be barely noticeable. The problem Cooper has is about a third of it is two to three feet deep when it is at pool stage. There is another big section of it that is about five to six feet deep at pool stage. As summer comes on the two to three foot section really heats up and starts to evaporate and as that process begins the five to six foot section begins to become shallow enough to come into the process of over heating. During the drought of 2006 we lost over 2/3's of the lake because of that.
A lot of that could be stopped if they'd let it fill to the top of the spillway, that would allow those shallow flats to become deep enough to not be so susceptible to the heat but they say the dam is not designed to hold that pressure. This past spring when all the rains finally ended they left Cooper a foot high instead of draining it back to pool stage, it definitely made a difference. The discussion I had with the civil engineer we were actually talking about Fork and it gets pumped at the same rate as Cooper. He said Fork looses about a 1/10 of an inch to DFW pumping per month.

That's great.