I camped at Fairfield State Park back in early October. Real nice state park too right on the lake. What I noticed though is the lake had almost no boats on it. Anyone have any info on this powerplant lake?
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I camped at Fairfield State Park back in early October. Real nice state park too right on the lake. What I noticed though is the lake had almost no boats on it. Anyone have any info on this powerplant lake?
Sorry not me, I just pretty much hang here on Toledo Bend and just don't fish any place else. Also have Sam Rayburn just 25 miles from me.
Me too. Rayburn is 50 minutes from me. it is just too easy to get there. I thought I would try Fairfield, but from what I am reading on some other forums there is a fish kill there every year. Bummer.
That sucks and probably something that would keep me away from that one. Come over to the Bend sometime, we have some really great water over here and still many many trees under the water and some stumps still standing above water level. Lots of creeks and coves out the kazoo!Quote:
Originally Posted by Tonykarter
Skip's right about that.
Man, I do love Torpedo Bend. I just love running out of a western bay into the main body of the lake, say out of Six Mile and cutting the throttle and settling into the water. I scan the view from north to south and it just fills me with awe: All that water! All of those bays. Some of them are probably bigger than the majority of other man made lakes in the US. A man could spend a lifetime trying to figure out just one of them. (How the heck you turn off the italics anyway?) Most of my fishing there was accomplished in my youth, back in the 70's when the boat lanes were still well defined by massive stands of flooded timber, back before it started breaking off at the waterline and torpedoing so many unlucky fishermen as the trunks floated slightly under the surface. Back before anyone knew how to spell hydrilla, or knew what it was or how to fish it. Back when it was mostly only a fishing flooded timber thang. Back when everyone's go-to bait was a bait called...wait for it...a Red Fin. Who remembers a Red Fin? Or a Hell Bender! I wish you could have seen it then. You couldn't see the Louisiana side from the Texas side because of the TENS OF thousands of acres of flooded river bottom forests they left untouched when they inundated it. Listen, I use to idle along side some of the tree lines out in the middle of the lake in 40-50 feet of water...and the standing timber could still be as high as 60-70 feet above the water! HUNDREDS of thousands of them! Those were gigantic old growth trees, possibly virgin timber in their size. Forty to fifty foot off the bottom, and still MASSIVE girth around the trunks of a great many of the trees AT THE WATER LINE, so big two men probably could not have reach around them...and that at 40-50 feet off the bottom! I would have loved to have had the opportunity to walk and hunt those river bottoms before they flooded it, love to have seen if my old full choke sweet 16 would drop a squirrel from the top of one of those. Most probably not! I know most of Rayburn's bottom topography below the 147 bridge like the back of my hand...little mystery left for me there. Pretty bored actually. But the Bend? I get giddy thinking about what secrets that lake still holds. It is my Holy Grail. I would love to come over there and fish with y'all. Torpedo Bend is a bucket list thing for me...to spend the greater part of my retirement fishing it and figuring it out until I get too old to fish. I'll load the boat with camping and fishing gear, and just head out for a couple of weeks, living like a lake vagabond, primitive stealth camping after the evening bite, hit a strategic store or two beside the lake to fill up the gas tank and a burger and resupply/re-ice every couple of days. Little Honda inverter generator to recharge the trolling motor batteries. Not shave or cut my hair and scare little kids as I fish past their back yards, channeling visions of Tull's Aqualung here, or Bigfoot. Just fish and side scan my way from the back of one bay to the next, taking the time to smell the roses and enjoy what I was in too big of a hurry to notice back in my adrenaline-filled youth. Start as Six Mile and work counter clockwise around the lake, north, up the Texas side, then south down the LA side, and then back up the Texas side to Six Mile until I have covered every cove in the lake. (Question: Hope I ain't bitin' off too much here...Just how many miles of shoreline does the Bend have anyway?) What a wonderful place for an old man to play Huck Finn. What a wonderful retirement goal. Toledo Bend is nirvana. It will take many trips to complete, to do it slow and do it right, but IT SHALL come to pass, God as my witness.Quote:
Come over to the Bend sometime, we have some really great water over here and still many many trees under the water and some stumps still standing above water level. Lots of creeks and coves out the kazoo!
Toledo bend has 1200 miles of shore line.....+/-.........
Well, that's sobering. 1200 miles of shoreline huh? That certainly cast a pall on the festivities...
Duplicate post - sorry.
One of the reasons why I love that lake. There are many times I am fishing alone in the back of some creek there. I am not into crowds like some lakes have. Come join us at the Toledo Bend gathering the last weekend of February.
Thank you for the invite! I am planning on being there.
Well I started fishing this lake when it opened in the late 1960's and heck back them if you were standing on the boat ramp at 6 mile, you couldn't see the other bank which is where I live now. You should come fishing sometime!
also you mentioned the trees in middle of the lake in deep water, yes and did you know back the. Guys would fish spewing bass in the tree tops out in that deep water? They would actually lay eggs out there, LOL!
Redfin, yes and I still have a few, LOL! Also big back when was the Gold Rogue, it was a killer! Hellbenders I just hated, LOL! Ome of my very best baits for schooling bass was the smallest Redfin they made is Chrome and black back. They stopped making that length which I think was like 3 1/2" long. The bass just couldn't stand it! Of course spinner baits were also just deadly fished over that Hydrilla!
that is a great idea.....tony!
Thanks Chuck! Yeah, I'm romancing the idea of getting started this spring. Even have been looking real close at the lake and surroundings on Goggle maps. Make a 4-5 night run, say start Sunday through Friday, just to work out the plan for longer trips on it later, make sure I've got the right equipment and everything. I've got a close friend who I played little league with who just went through chemo and the doc says he is clear, but you know how that can go years down the road, so I want to get him out there and make some memories when he gets a little stronger. I'm using the Torpedo Bend experience to gear up for an even bigger attempt. My cousin up in Tennessee wants to put in at St. Louis and camp/fish/sightsee all the way to New Orleans down the Mississippi. One of my girlfriend's dads back when I was in high school...they lived out on the Neches River north of Beaumont, his wife died and one day, he just provisioned his 24-foot cuddy cabin boat and motored off: Down the Neches to the Intercoastal Waterway, over to Florida, then back to the Mississippi, up it and its tributaries. Four and a half years later he ties back up to the dock at his house and gets out. Now THAT is adventure to tell your grandkids about. Skip, I'd like to sit around the campfire and listen to your 60's Bend stories some time. I love hearing the stories about those lakes when they were young. You got to fish Toledo it in its heyday, in bass fishing's heyday, didn't you? Before even Larry Nixon or Tommy Martin got famous on it. Lucky man! Some of my dad's friends told of getting lost out in those flooded forests when it was first flooded and the trees were still green. They said you could get out in them and not see either Texas or LA. As they started to thin out in the 70's and 80's I went back in them. I could see where I wanted to go, but often it got scary as the floating logs made it like a maze. You really had to be careful and try to memorize the way back out or it got hairy...especially if the wind came up and you were trying to maneuver a crooked route back out of them with only a beat-up old second-hand Ram trolling motor that wouldn't stay locked down! One of my crappie buddies was on the Bend fishing a bass tournament the morning the shuttle came down in it. He said they couldn't see two hundred yards because of the fog, and then they started hearing sonic booms and the hissing of parts cutting through the air and impacting the lake at hundreds of miles an hour. They had no way of knowing it went down, and were very unnerved by something that they could not see or explain, something almost surreal, but it was happening none the less. Those sounds and the sounds of massive splashes all around them scared the mortal crap out of them. He said they hit a bank and dove for cover, as scared as he had ever been. I hope he comes with me to the get together in February. He can tell everyone about it. But heck, you were there too weren't you?
Absolutely, a big piece of that Shuttle came right over my house and left a smoke trail while it whistled through the air. I stepped out I. The car port and could hear it go by. Stepped out to see that tail. Amazing thing that was, but so tragic too.
we fished here most every weekend for many years other than hunting season. We learned about night fishing early on through an article we read and for 10 years every weekend we fish from one afternoon until the next evening, LOL! One night me and one other got our line broke 6 times in the same spot. Back them it was all mono, but we were using 25 to 35 pound mono!
also not just bass, but I had a spot in 1979 that I could take anyone, like my wife and we woulld catch 60-70 big crappie per hour!
also got lost in the fog one night and couldn't get out of water that was 40' deep, LOL!
I had read that NASA used Fin and Feather as a base camp after that happened - and a reason why it's so nice today from the funding.
We had camped on one of the larger islands back in the late 70's. When we got up the fog was so thick we just fished around the island to give it time to lift before we even tried to head out...we didn't even have a compass. We could hear a boat coming and I guess when he saw the bank he turned and followed it thinking he knew where he was. He circled that island twice. The third time he settled in and asked us if we had seen him pass us before. We told him we had watched him come by twice already. He didn't know it was an island! We all had a good laugh and fished within sight of it until it lifted. March 10, 1993: I got lost in the fog on Rayburn at dusk trying to cross it from Veach going west to Sandy Creek. Lake was glass, and where it and the fog met you could not tell...everything was a dark grey, and getting darker. The grey dusk fog reflected off the water so both were the same color. It was like being in a sensory depravation tank. All you saw was the edges of the boat, and beyond that grey without any dimension, no depth perception, none, other than the side spray of the boat. I could not hear any sounds in the distance from which to take a bearing. I guess the fog knocked it down. Without depth perception and with no sound it was very spooky out in the middle of a dead calm and dead quiet lake. I ran about ten miles through that, bearing north instead of west, following the lightest spot in the sky thinking it was what was left of the sunset, and that would lead me to a western bank. It wasn't the setting suns last glow, the light spot was just the thinnest portion of the fog letting the last light through, and it moved and varied as the fog varied, but I couldn't perceive that it was. It lead me on a goose chase, and I couldn't tell it at the time, but that is all I had to hang my hat on. I unknowingly ran north right through the middle of the Black Forest on plane and at speed, twice almost hitting the trees that were left in it back then. I was scared ****less. I ended up hitting land on Calhoun point. Did not know where I was until daybreak. Slept in the bottom of the boat on throw cushions and life vests in a slicker suit in a hissing, drizzling rain most of the night. Actually slept quite good under the circumstances...the cushions allowed the rain to drain beneath me without getting me wet. Thickest fog I've ever been in. If you got far enough away from the bank to trim the motor down so as to make headway you could not see the bank to follow it. If you got close enough to keep the bank in sight you could not trim the motor down to make headway. Since then I have always kept overnight gear in the boat. And a compass.Quote:
also got lost in the fog one night and couldn't get out of water that was 40' deep, LOL!
Man, that's just downright scary right there.