What type of bait were you catching those blues on?

SW on the Trinity, from dallas? I THINK NOT! The trinity flows South And East from Dallas, towards the Houston area and Trinity bay.

I grew up in the Trinity Bottomlands near where Simpson Stuart rd ends. There used to be a big slough across the pasture that ran parallell to the river. Full of bass, big ones, and catfish, back in the day. Also that pasture and bottomlands were primo swamp rabbit hunting grounds, and the pasture was top grade grazing grass for the big herd of dairy cattle that called it home.

Lemmon Lake was just above the slough, and it once produced a gator, about 10 ft long, that JJ Lemmon himself sent to that great belt boot and shoe factory in the sky, measured about 10 ft and made the DMN sports section! The river had some good level bank access pts and some big flatheads and blues, along with channels, and genuine Alligator gars were there for the taking. Being the trinity, nothing in that part of river was fit to eat, but one pier 6 brawl with a Trinity flathead,or a 80-100 lb plus Gator Gar and you didn't care, the rush it produced was almost transcendental!

For eating fish, we had 5 mile creek and about 2 miles above where it merges with the trinity, we had a swimming hole, a fishing hole,full of big channel cats, chunky black bass, and fat crappies, a waterfall, and a dense hardwood forest full of fat squirrels for plinking. We got hungry we would just saunter over to the well watered truck gardens that produced virtually every kind of vegetable and fruit you could ever hope to eat, including watermelons and cantaloupes in the summer. Wild dewberries in the spring and native persimmons in the winter, and the forest had pecans of all varieties, including huge papershells! Today, that verdant bottom pasture is no more, and if the satellite pics are correct the slough is gone, the hardwood forest is now I-45, the 5 mile creek channel has been diverted, and the artesian wells got drained so the city could run sewer lines and make the septic tanks go away, and when the wells went so did the truck farms.

Progress, you say! I guess, but those were some of the sweetest watermelons, the fattest squirrels and swamp rabbits, and about the most adventure and fun a kid could have.

Ahhh

Rudy

Did y'all get those flats on cut shad too?