There are very large stripers below canyon lake dam.Have been for years...After a good water discharge from canyon lake below the dam..
The stripers start to eat the pan size trout stocked in the river
..expensive to us tax payers and Texas Parks and Wildlife put and take fish program...electric shock stripers in river..remove some for hatchery for future stripers for lake stockings in Texas lakes
and some stripers removed from river and returned to lake...
the ones that die in process ..meat is given to childrens homes in areas..

Learn something new everyday. Makes sense when you put it that way

The majority of the trout die off over the summer. Leave, what very few stripers alone!

Actually those pools where they removed the stripers from hold trout year around and the survival rate is high for the trout in a lot of the area directly below the dam where the water stays cold as long as they keep the release rate above a certain flow rate, which they seem to do.

If you've ever witnessed stripers of any size in the lake hitting shad on the surface, you would know that they are savage surface feeders when they go into a feeding frenzy.

You can pretty much figure out that TPWD won't act in that way unless they see a danger to a fishery, and or pressure to act from other sources.

get rid of some real trophy fish... to save some dinky [censored] trout LOL...

LOL I grew up catching trout in northern NM, I'd much rather catch one of those Stripers!!

And this coming from two guys who said they would rather fish Calaveras for redfish than have to drive all the way down to the Coast to catch them? LOL!

Could be there is a bunch of folks that don't want to have drive all the way to New Mexico to catch trout!

They also had several kids fishing days, and a day on the river with the Wounded Warriors catching those dinky trout from kayaks, so I doubt it mattered on the size of the fish they were after.

It's a fishery that a lot of people feel needs to be protected in this part of Texas so it's all good!

Stripers are not stocked in the Guadalupe River.

Your 100% correct on that one Jimbo. My father-in-law lives about 300 yards up river from Horse Shoe Falls and about the same distance from the discharge below canyon..It took me a few years to figure them out but I have 6 stripers landed from 20# to 26#'s and 0ne over 30#. My biggest was 35.12 and almost 41" long..( I have that one mounted )

I tried to use big live gizzard shad and all I ever had was bait pick ups with good runs and very few hook ups..Tried circle hooks because the J hooks were not working and still the same results. Finally switched to cut shad and small perch on a Santee rig..I have only caught a couple small 5 pounders in the day time and most of the bigger fish have probably been caught from 9 pm on to the early morning hours. Those trout lures work well too. The stripers really bite when they start letting the trout go below the dam..I will attach a few pics so ya'll can see what I'm talking about..My daughter caught a 24 pounder that was 37" long last thanksgiving.. It almost pulled her in the water :)I hope the pics show up???

35.12 pounder

Rileys 24 pounder

They shocked those stripers between the 3rd and 4th crossing..I've caught stripers down there(at night) but they were never bigger than 12 pounds..Still a 12 pounder is a hoot to catch out of a kayak or canoe

When they open up the gates to 5,000 cfs we have seen a number of 20+ pound stripers floating down splashing around on top.. I guess thier swim bladders were still catywhompus from the 90+ feet deep that they were in when they "Exited" the lake..lol

Yep, I personally knew a fella who passed away a few years back that caught them regularly right below the gates where everyone fishes for trout when they release them.

They've been there as long as I remember people will continue to catch them, but they can wreck havoc on the trout population, and why TPWD tries to keep a handle on it.

People get upset when they see them take a few out, but they can't get them all.

They are like the "Wild Hogs" of the river..Your right, they will never get all of them out of there.. When I used to frame houses in the late 80's we used to fish off the bank down at horse shoe falls and I watched a fella catch a 54 pounder(I didn't know him)..It would have been a record "BUT" he used a "No-No" bait to nab it.. The people that owned the property we were on ran him off and called the game warden..He had a baloon out with a 10" live trout on it..Some people are just dumb..Oh well, it was really cool to see a striper that big.. It's stomach was so big it looked like it had a football in it..Probably full of trout???Thats an image I will never forget.

Here is my sons biggest from the river..It was just a tad over 17#'s

That is a great striper and a memory that boy won't ever forget or you either!

Thanks for posting the pictures, and the stories that went with them!

where's all the trophy 7"ers?

I released this one for another day