A fishing journal... from July of 2009

I grew up in Oklahoma so any trip there, especially one that includes bass fishing holds a special place in my heart. Though I have lived in Houston for 40 plus years, in July of 2009 I set my sights on catching the Oklahoma state record largemouth black bass. Oklahoma has many great bass fishing lakes but there is one lake that holds particular interest for me. That particular lake is the Old Mountain Lake. It is located in the very heart of the Arbuckle Mountains, and is not to be confused with the Lake of the Arbuckle’s.


The Old Mountain Lake is a small lake of a few hundred acres. It was impounded in the1920’s and was originally only 210 acres. Some time in the late 40’s the dam was lengthened and raised, increasing the surface area to what it is today. The dam is located about a half of a mile north of the location where my Grandfather and Grandmother’s white, wood framed house stood on my family’s old homestead commonly referred to as “the ranch”.


The Old Mountain Lake is one of the three earliest of my bass fishing memory lakes. The other two are smaller lakes, perhaps a few dozen acres each, located on creeks above, and that feed into the Old Mountain Lake. These two lakes, built somewhat earlier than the Old Mountain Lake are known but to us, the family, as the Upper and Lower lakes because of their locations on the mountain in relationship to each other. One being upper and the other being lower on the mountain. In my earliest memories of around three or four years of age these lakes figured prominently in the shaping of what would become a lifelong passion. That passion is bass fishing.


Unfortunately, my Grandfather and Grandmother moved from the homestead in the mid 50’s when I was only about five, so I never got to fully appreciate these lakes. They are only distant memories, sometimes nothing more then glimpses, shapes, and shadows of times that were. I do however remember the fish. There would be stringers of bass, crappie, catfish and perch for the table brought in by the elders, such as my dad, or uncle, my mother, aunts, and cousins, and of course Grandmother. None of which could match the ten-pound Kentucky Large Mouth Black Bass beauty that my Grandfather once landed in the Lower lake.


Since that time, I have fished many, many, lakes but have longed to fish any of the three mountain lakes at whatever opportunity might arise. Over the last many years there have been only three such opportunities. One of those opportunities came up in July of 2009… and I took it. I personally believed it to be an opportunity to not only reconnect with my past, and bring my own sons, then 19 and 15 years of age into contact with that past, and a piece of their heritage, but also an opportunity to break the large mouth bass Oklahoma state record. After all the Oklahoma state record was set at this lake in 1994 and though the record has fallen to another lake since then it was my belief that fifteen years later it could well do it again.





To be continued…

Gridleak

 

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