Phil H. Shook Journalist Author Photographer

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“Proving A Point At Purtis Creek”

Fly Fishing Quarterly
By Phil H. Shook

Fly fishing outfitter Ed Spencer has journeyed to South America in search of peacock bass, to Canada for brookies, and to Alaska for rainbows, silvers and kings. But on this spring morning he appears totally absorbed casting a hard-bodied popper from a float tube on a 355-acre lake only a 90-minute drive from his North Dallas store.

Before the sun gets too high, Ed and I will hook about a dozen largemouths in the 2- to 6-pound range as we drift lazily among the sunken timber and floating weedbeds. The fish that don't get off after the first few jumps in the heavy cover are released at tubeside.

We normally release our bass anyhow but on this lake we don't have an option. Catch-and-release is the rule at Purtis Creek State Park in a carefully monitored, long-running experiment being conducted by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.

A small impoundment by Texas standards, Purtis Creek is located about 70 miles south of Dallas just off US 175 near the town of Eustice. Instead of the thunderous sound of bas boats taking off at dawn and the silhouettes of waterskiers bouncing across wakes, ther's an all-too-rare sense of tranquility at Purtis Creek. The peace is broken only by the shirring of trolling motors and the "plop-plop" of Dahlberg Divers chugging through lily pads.

Filled with flooded timber and ringed by red oaks, dogwoods and black walnuts, Purtis Creek is an angler's lake by design. Relatively manageable in size, its heavy cover, flooded levees, numerous flats and coves make it particularly attractive to flyfishers. A Wooly Bugger teased along the bank in the spring can produce a 6-inchy bream on one cast and a 4-pound bass on the next.

In only a few years, Purtis Creek has earned a reputation for producing black bass in quality and quantity. Bass in excess of 13 pounds have been weighed on hand-held scales and at least one 10-pound fish reportedly has been taken there on a fly rod.

Such high-quality bass fishing so close to a large urban center didn't happen by chance. Stocked with pure Florida-strain largemouths in 1984, Purtis Creek opened four years later as the only lake of its size in the state where catch-and-release is being used to develop a superior fishery.

The lake is also stocked with copper-nose bluegills, redear sunfish, channel catfish and crappie, all of which anglers may keep, subject to statwide bag limits.

In addition to the release-only rule on bass, no more than 50 boats are permitted on the lake during the daylight fishing hours. A no-wake rule is strictly enforced, and even the run back to the launch ramp at the end of the day must be done at idle speed.

Quality fishing didn't occur at Purtis Creek only because of a catch-and-release edict. The immensely popular fishery has been carefully managed and has proven to be remarkable resilient through a stressful period just after startup in 1988, according to Richard Ott, a fisheries biologist with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.

After four years of carefully monitoring the fishery, quarterly electro-shocking studies, creel surveys and constant feedback from anglers, data on the Parks and Wildlife

Department's catch-and-release experiment speaks for itself: fishing pressure (measured through the 1991 season ) is at 300 angler/hours per hectare per year, 10 times the level of activity on other Texas lakes.

The fish population is judged to be in excellent shape. "We have a length frequency that is consistently showing us fish of 21 and 22 inches, which is a very good population structure," said Ott.

The catch rate at Purtis Creek is 0.35 fish per hour, double the state standard. In some of the periods surveyed, catch rates on the lake climbed as high as .7 fish per hour.

More than 50 percent of the anglers who have filled out written questionnaires have rated their fishing day at Purtis Creek "good or very good," nearly double the responses received in these categories at most other Texas reservoirs.

Parks and Wildlife officials have shown patience in developing the Purtis Creek fishery. Faced with an onslaught of anglers when the lake was opened in the fall of 1988, the bass population fell into decline almost immediately. Ott, who serves as project manager for the district that includes Purtis Creek, said he knows what caused it. "The lake opened with a bass population that was dominated by large fish-an awful lot of fish in the 14- to 18-inch range-and unfortunately we feel a lot of those were lost to hooking mortality during that opening period of incredibly high angler pressure." No matter how careful they are handled and released, some fish are going to die, Ott said.

The predominance of big fish also had an adverse effect on the growth of the bass population at the outset. "There wee so many big fish out there that they were devouring their own reproduction," Ott said.

But anglers soon began to sense the decline in the fish population and backed off somewhat, reducing the catch rate at the lake. With the angling pressure down and with some of the bigger fish now lost to hooking mortality, the remaining fish were able to reproduce. Ott said this aided the critical "recruitment" process in which juvenile fish make the necessary progression in the growth cycle to maturity.

Ott said the 1989 year class was a very strong group of fish and as it grew it provided the basis for the present, more stable fish population.

By the fall of 1990 and the spring of 1991, Ott said the fishery was well into a recovery, something that would not have happened without the catch-and-release rule. "Without catch-and-release, you would have seen an immediate boom and bust," Ott said. "We wouldn't have had a recovery of the fishery because there would not have been any fish there to recover."

Angling pressure has now come back to levels even higher than the startup year, Ott said, but now there's a better balance between recruitment of young fish and the replacement of those fish being eliminated due to hooking mortality. "We have a cycling of the fish population that is continuing at a rate about 10 times what we can support anywhere else because these fish are being used over and over again."

Ott said the Parks and Wildlife Department was a little hesitant about introducing catch-and-release on any Texas lake. "We weren't sure anglers would accept it," he said. "Purtis Creek has proven that anglers have been more than willing to practice it."

In order to monitor the growth of the largest fish in the lake, Parks and Wildlife altered regulations in the fall of 1992 to allow anglers who catch a bass longer than 22 inches to retain the fish in a live well for as long as it takes to get it it a certification station for weighing and measuring. Purtis Creek is an experimental station for catch-and-release, with anglers having a major role in the operation of the laboratory.

"We can tell anglers all we want about how much we can accomplish with catch-and-release," Ott said. "But at Purtis Creek, we show them how the system works."

Catch-and-release isn't perfect-hooking mortality is a reality, even with fish as sturdy as largemouth bass-but it works, and it's as good a management tool in warmwater fisheries as it is in trout streams. And isn't it a nice change to hear some good news?

Winter 1993