WOOD COUNTY, Texas — An East Texas fishing club is out to prove different is a good thing. In this edition of Hooked On East Texas, we check out a weekly fishing tournament on Lake Fork that focuses on conservation and competition.
Jack White, 81, has been fishing for 70 years. He got into fishing after returning from Vietnam. Fishing helped him work through adapting to civilian life and deal with the trauma of war.
White whips his favorite lure into some weeds along a bank and he said the weekly Lake Fork Anglers Bass Fishing Club tournaments are competitive.
“It’s a competition with me. Isn’t it with you Randy. I crawl in that boat I want to beat somebody," White said.
The Randy that White referred to is angler Randy Bunch. White is Bunch's co-angler in this unique tournaments setup. The angler runs the trolling motor, while the co-angler sits in the back of the boat. Points are kept in separate categories. More importantly, it means older anglers like White can fish longer.
“You know they get to a point that they’re not capable of a running a boat or they’re not comfortable with running a boat or whatever it may be. They can just go fish as a co-angler," Bunch said.
But the most important aspect of the tournament focuses on conservation.
White’s first catch of the day isn’t weighed, instead it’s measured. He doesn’t put in a live well, Instead, he releases it back into Lake Fork.
"It conserves the bass. The more you handle a bass the more you knock the [protective slime off of ‘em," White said.
So how do they know how much the fish weighed? Texas Parks & Wildlife has a length-weight conversion table and it provides the answer.
“We actually have a computer program that tells you a fish that’s 19-inches long weighs four pounds," Bunch said.
Anglers write the length on a scorecard. At the end of the day, the club gathers to tally up the results. There’s no weigh-in, but the computer program tells organizers that in this tournament Dennis Bubinas had the heaviest stringer of fish.
“It was a five fish tournament. So I was looking at five decent fish, but all my fish came very shallow. I was throwing way up on the bank, and they were hiding up on the bank and the weeds," Bubinas said after the tournament.
There is a weekly cost to enter the tournament. It'll cost $20, but the contestant does have the chance to win. For instance, this week's winning angler got $85. They say it's about the competition. But it's about conservation and camaraderie. There are roughly four dozen members and every week about half the membership fishes.
Galen Hall, president of the Lake Fork Anglers Bass Fish Club, said the group started these paper tournaments in 2014 with one goal in mind: take care of the bass in Lake Fork.
“Our deal is to take care of the fish because the fish are really our main thing. And so we're after them, but we want to take care of them. We want to be able to fish them for many years," Hall said.
The tournament also goes along with Lake Fork's slot limit. Any bass between 16 and 24 inches in length must immediately be released back into Lake Fork.
The Lake Fork Anglers Fishing Club is accepting new members. Those interested can find out more about how to become a member by visiting the club on Facebook.