Brays Bayou event a keeper in many ways
At first, second or even third glance, Brays Bayou isn’t likely to make anyone’s list of Texas’ premier recreational fisheries or even be recognized as a fishery at all.
Certainly, the idea of holding a fishing tournament and fish/fishingfocused event on what is one of the most urbanized waterways in the state seems unfathomable. Except it’s not. It’s brilliant, and why as many as 150 or so anglers will ply its waters Oct. 28 in what will be the second annual contest/event aimed at highlighting the waterway’s fishery, educating the public about the waterway and the threats some of its fish pose and connecting urban Houstonians to a natural world right in their own backyards.
Brays Bayou is an unlikely site for such things. The bayou rises in Fort Bend County just about where Westheimer Road, Westpark Tollway and Clodine Road form a triangular traffic nightmare, flows east through an almost unbroken sea of subdivisions and neighborhoods in southwest Houston, through Bellaire, the south side of West University Place, the Texas Medical Center and on through the heart of Houston until it joins Buffalo Bayou square in the middle of the Port of Houston.
Brays and its tributaries, Keegans Bayou and Willow Waterhole Bayou, hold about 120 miles of channels, every inch of them bent, straightened, lined with concrete or otherwise manipulated, mauled and misshapen by human hands. The bayou is wholly urban, a once natural waterway transformed into little more than a sluice for effluent and rain runoff. Or so it seems.
But a closer look shows the waterway, like the dozen or so other bayous that vein Houston and give the metropolis its “Bayou City” sobriquet, maintains a decidedly feral character.
“There’s a tremendous fishery in Brays Bayou,” Mark Marmon. said. “It’s a much richer waterway that most people can imagine.”
Marmon would know. For more than 30 years, the long-time Bellaire resident has stalked the concretelined banks of Brays Bayou, fly rod in hand, fishing for personal enjoyment and operating Metro Anglers, a business built on teaching fishing skills and guiding anglers to Houston’s innercity angling opportunities.
Over those years, Marmon has caught 18 species of fish from the Brays system. Many of those fish — largemouth bass, several species of sunfish, gar, catfish, crappie, white bass — are among the 50 or so species of native Texas freshwater fish calling the bayou home. But many — most, really — of the fish he and other Brays anglers land are not native Texans, or even native to North America.
The majority of fish in Brays and other Houston bayous are non-native species, aliens introduced to the waterway mostly through ignorance, poor judgment and missteps in fisheries management. More than a dozen species of non-native fish live — thrive — in Brays Bayou. But a handful — grass carp, common carp, armored catfish and two species of tilapia — dominate. And while those non-native fish create most of the angling opportunity in the bayou, they also cause significant ecological and economic damage.
“Invasive species are a big problem, whether it’s tallow trees on land or grass carp in the bayou,” said Ralph Rieger, president of the Willow Waterway Greenspace Conservancy, a volunteer organization managing a 300-acre patch of land developed as an innovative park designed to mitigate flooding by mimicking natural systems.
Willow Waterhole Greenspace, located along its namesake waterway in the Westbury area of southwest Houston, has seen the negative effects of Brays Bayou’s invasive fish.
Attempts to grow aquatic vegetation in the parks wetlands and ponds, as well as the bayou proper, have been stymied by the voracious appetite of the vegetarian grass carp. That aquatic vegetation is crucial to water clarity and quality (the plants filter suspended sediment from water) and as habitat for all manner of aquatic life, including fish.
The bayou holds a thriving, reproducing population of grass carp, fish that can grow to more than 30 pounds. It also holds swarms of armored catfish, South American natives sold as juveniles by the aquarium trade as “algae eaters” and released into the bayous when the fish grow too large for captivity. The shovel-headed, hard-scaled catfish that look like something out of a science fiction film thrive in the bayous, where their behavior as communal cavity nesters causes problems. Using their shovel heads, the armored catfish build their nests by burrowing into shallows along the banks of the bayou, often turning stretches of bank into something like Swiss cheese. That burrowing undermines the banks, resulting in sloughing, collapse and erosion of those banks. That damages the bayou’s hydrology, affecting its ability to handle floodwaters.
Tilapia, an African species, competes directly with native species for space and food, as do all of the bayou’s other invasive fish species.
Negatives for waterway
Other than providing some very challenging and exciting fishing — a 10-pound grass carp is a world-class battle on light tackle — the bayou’s invasive fish species have no positives for the waterway and plenty of negatives. That is reflected in Texas’ fishing regulations that require anglers who land grass carp, armored catfish, tilapia or other non-native fish listed as “invasives” to immediately dispatch the fish. Texas fisheries managers want invasives out of the state’s waters.
The bayou’s surprisingly vibrant, diverse, accessible fishery combined with benefits of removing those non-natives and educating the public about both the fishing opportunities the bayou offers and the problems caused by invasives triggered an idea in folks such as Marmon, Rieger and others with ties to the bayou. How about a fishing tournament and associated events that would accomplish both goals?
This past year, the collaborative efforts of a collection of private individuals, fishing organizations, academia, local and state government created under the highly appropriate name Carp and Armored-Catfish Removal Plan (CARP) Task Force resulted in the inaugural Brays Bayou Invasive Fish Round-Up and Carp-AThon. The 2016 event, held at the Willow Waterhole Greenspace in late September, included environmental education, fishing instruction and a fishing tournament targeting invasive species.
“We didn’t know if it would be successful or not,” Marmon, who was involved in the event’s planning, said. “We hoped to get maybe 50 fishermen to sign up.”
The tournament drew 125 or so anglers. And scores of folks, many of them families, participated in the free fishing instruction, educational seminars and booths and other offerings at the event.
“It turned out to pretty much exceed all expectations,” Rieger said.
So they are doing it again.
The second annual Brays Bayou Invasive Fish Round-Up and Carp-AThon is scheduled for Oct. 28 at Willow Waterhole Greenspace, 5300 Dryad Road.
The fishing tournament, which incudes categories for conventional tackle, fly tackle and youth, involves a $20 entry fee that’s waived for seniors and anglers younger than 12.
The associated event at Willow Waterhole Greenspace is free to the public and will include fishing instruction, casting contests, informational seminars on invasive species, flood mitigation and other topics. More information on the event is available at willowwaterhole.org and through Texas Flyfishers of Houston, texasflyfishers.org.
Long-term possibilities
No one involved in the fishing tournament expects it to have any real immediate effect on the plague of non-native fish infesting Houston’s urban waterways; recreational fishing could never remove enough invasives to make a dent in their numbers. But the event has loftier goals that include connecting Houstonians with the bayous that are so much a part of their city, increasing awareness of issues surrounding invasive species and introducing young Texans to the rewarding, life-long recreation of fishing.
It certainly will make some folks look at Brays Bayou in a different way.