Drive around famed Lake Fork and you’ll be amazed by how much standing timber there is. Take a stroll across Toledo Bend’s mid-lake Pendleton Bridge and the area around you looks as much like a place to affix a tree stand as it does for chasing bass. And big Sam Rayburn – well, it’s sufficient to say that one of the lake’s most fabled fishing areas is known as the Black Forest.
That’s all well and good, because the trees give the bass plenty of places to hide and grow big. When the lakes were young and the trees stood tall, they served to guide boaters and even block the wind on occasion. But now that the Texas waterways are starting to show their age, many of the rotted trees have broken off just below the water’s surface. That makes for some pretty hairy, dangerous and costly boat rides.
Lake Fork guide and tournament pro Lance Vick put it more succinctly: “The fiberglass businesses around here do pretty well.”
During the busy season, Vick added, it’s not usual to see a bent prop shaft, a damaged prop or a boat wedged up on a stump nearly every day. These lakes eat lower units for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Imagine that: you’ve saved your vacation all year long, driven from out of state to catch a couple of tens, and you don’t make it two miles before you wreck your boat.
While there are boat lanes, they’re not always well-marked, which gave Vick an idea to put the lanes on memory cards. Spend a few bucks now, save a lot by not having to visit the repair shop. So he physically ran all of the lanes at Fork, Rayburn and monstrous Toledo Bend and now has them for sale at www.boatlanes.com. You can get one lake for under 30 bucks, two for less than 50 and all three for 80 bones, only a fraction of what a new prop would cost.
“It was my idea from the ground up,” said Vick, who has been guiding at Fork for 14 years. “One of the things that kept recurring on my guide trips was that clients wanted to know how to get around Lake Fork. The older the lake gets, the more timber falls in and the buoy system is far from adequate. The older the lake gets, the more timber falls in and the buoy system is far from adequate. With the technology we have today, instead of just reaching a hundred people a year, now I can help thousands.”
The technology is so simple that your average computer-challenged bass clubber should have no trouble using it and there’s no need to wait for the mail if you’re in a hurry. You can sit in your living room in Maine or Alaska or even Normal, Illinois, and download the information straight to a memory card. Then, when your coffee-fueled drive to your dream vacation ends at a ramp on one of the big Texas lakes, you’re ready to go….no muss, no fuss.
Lots of anglers are already clamoring for Vick to cover more lakes, and he plans to oblige – Ray Roberts, just outside of Dallas, may be next – but as of yet he has no plans to produce a similar guide to places where he’s caught fish in the past, like when he was part of the winning four-man team at last year’s Toyota Texas Bass Classic. But navigation is half the battle, and if you have to spend less time learning how to run, you can spend more time slinging a big old red rattletrap, a swimbait or a filling-rattling spinnerbait for your Texas lunker.