Anyone that regularly fishes Sam Rayburn has probably had TPWD personnel come up to them and ask a bunch of questions. Most folks are pretty friendly about answering all those questions, but nearly everyone has had to wonder what we do with all that information and why we’re running around asking all those questions in the first place. What those TPWD personnel are doing is actually conducting what we call a creel survey. Creel surveys are highly useful to TPWD because they help us monitor fishing effort, catch, harvest rates, sizes of fish being caught, economic impacts of the fishery, angler preferences, and most of all it allows us to interact with the public and answer any questions that folks may have while on the water.

We conduct creel surveys on Sam Rayburn on an annual quarterly basis, meaning that we break the year up into three month blocks (quarters) and do an equal number of creel surveys for each quarter. We conduct nine creel surveys for each quarter, which comes out to be 10% of the time and for further sake of statistics we do creels more often on weekend days than week days (5 weekend days and 4 weekdays), because more folks fish on the weekends than weekdays. In addition to all that, the amount of time we are out doing these creel surveys is based on the length of the day, meaning that in the summer we are out there longer. Anyway if all that is confusing don’t sweat it, I’m just trying to emphasize that we do these creel surveys with the intent of being able to produce reliable statistics at the end of the year.

Creel surveys are not designed to collect any personal information or to pin point specific fishing holes. We don’t collect names, boat numbers or any other information that we can use to go back and be able to identify a specific person we talked to. Another thing we don’t do is mark way points or even make note where on the lake we spoke to folks. In other words your fishing spot is safe, all we’re out to do is gather information to help us determine the things I talked about earlier. We are aware that folks are out fishing to enjoy themselves and we do our best to keep our creel interviews as brief as possible and not to interfere with anyone’s fishing. Generally, it takes about two minutes to go through all the questions and then we’re out of there to leave you alone. We don’t ask people to pull fish out of their live wells to show us the size of them. We take the fishermen’s word on the length, we know that there are a lot of tournaments and expense involved and the last thing we want is for someone to lose a fish because we’re out there making them hold them up for us.

Like I said it takes about two minutes to go through the creel interview questions. We’re interested in how long you’ve been fishing and how much longer you plan on being out. Of course we want to know what you have caught. Lastly we’ll ask your zip code (we use this to see where all folks are coming from to use the lake) and how much money you spent for your fishing trip. I’ll be the first to say I don’t like the money question, I believe how people spend their money is personal, but this information helps determine economic impacts of the fishery which helps TPWD determine where to devote its resources and efforts.

Here are some things that we learned over the past year on Sam Rayburn doing the creel survey:

Fishermen spent an estimated 771,750 hours fishing this past year. To give you an idea how much time that is, an individual person would have to fish 88 years around the clock to match that.

Percent of fishing time devoted to targeting the following fish – Black bass (78%), Crappie (15%), Catfish (4.5%), and Other fish (2.5%).Fishermen on Sam Rayburn catch an average of 2 fish for every hour they fish, with one of those two fish being a keeper. Bass fishermen don’t feel bad, the average fishermen catches less than one largemouth per hour of fishing time and it takes a little over 2 hours to catch a legal sized largemouth bass. Crappie fishermen skew the catch rates by catching three crappie per hour with half being keepers. Last year fishermen on Sam Rayburn caught an estimated 1,524,035 fish of which they kept 680,290 fish and released the rest. Interestingly more fish are harvested in the summer and more fish are released in the spring.

Here is a general breakout of the major fish species harvested and released for this past year:
Largemouth Bass – Harvest 195,160 / Released 439,720
Spotted Bass – Harvest 4,170 / Released 1,695
Crappie – Harvest 345,330 / Released 314,580
Channel Catfish – Harvest 95,040 / Released 72,660
Bluegill – Harvest 27,350 / Released 8,430 Last year fishermen came from over 300 zip code areas to fish on Sam Rayburn spending an estimated $7,737,890 to do so.As always, if you should have any questions concerning this article or have any other fishery questions please don’t hesitate to contact me at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or call me at 409-384-9572. Good Luck and Good Fishing!

Dan Ashe is a fisheries biologist with Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. He has worked out of the Jasper, Texas field office since 2005 helping to manage east Texas reservoirs including Sam Rayburn and Toledo Bend. Dan has also worked as fisheries biologist in Puerto Rico, California, and Alaska but now calls Texas home.