Hot Striper Action on Lake Texoma

Striper fishing is often as hot as a Texas summer on Lake Texoma, the 94,000-acre impoundment on the Red River, a little over an hour’s drive north of Dallas.

- Luke Clayton

The Red and Washita River drainages were dammed in 1944 to create Lake Texoma, situated mostly in Oklahoma with a portion in Texas. Little did the World War II German prisoners of war know that the massive dam they helped to construct in the vast bottomland between the rivers would become a world-class striped bass fishery, attracting striper anglers from across the country. I’m also pretty sure the biologists in charge of the new fishery had no idea of what was to come.

Stripers were first stocked in 1965 as an experiment. Thanks to salt mines about 40 miles upstream on the Red River, a water salinity nearly perfect for stripers, particularly spawning stripers, was created. Striped bass are a saltwater species, but make their annual spawning runs up brackish rivers. So, the salinity of the river feeding Lake Texoma was critical.

During spawning, female stripers are driven to the surface by the males, where they release as many as 3 million transparent eggs each. The eggs are fertilized by male milt, absorb water, and must float in the water column, carried by currents, until they hatch in two to three days. If the fertilized eggs sink to the bottom, they die.

The 1965 stockings flourished. Upon reaching maturity, these fish made spawning runs up both the Red and Washita rivers, and the rest was history.

Ask any serious striped bass angler from the Chesapeake Bay to Texas about the great fishing at Texoma and chances are they’ve already fished the lake; or the rich, emerald green water is on their hit list. There are a few other inland reservoirs with a documented striper spawn, but none with the regularity or success of Lake Texoma.