Choke Canyon Reservoir in Three Rivers between San Antonio and Corpus Christi was created by damming the Frio River. I'm at the Choke Canyon State Park there. The reservoir is big, probably about 12 miles by 3 miles. Apparently there's lots of catfish of all sorts, blue, yellow, flathead, channel, etc. because they have a 25 fish and 18 inches limit. Apparently lots of white, smallmouth and striper bass too.
Between last night and this morning I spotted 20-30 deer, one of them a buck with a nice rack, probably six points or greater. I also saw my first road runner, meep meep... what else, running across the road where I'm camped. He looked just like the cartoon character with its skinny neck and top knot. I didn't see Wylie Coyote though. He must have been lurking in the bush hatching a new plot to catch the road runner.
The day started out mild enough with bright sunshine and temperatures approaching 60 degrees. A cold front was moving in and winds up to 40 knots are forecast. While checking the park out last night I found a boat ramp below the dam where the Frio River emerged from all that concrete. It looked attractive enough so I launched around 9:15am this morning.
The river (creek?) is only about 20 feet wide but has high banks on either side 15-20 feet high. A fair number of mid-size, twisty, knarly oaks draped in Spanish moss line those banks. Two dozen or so ducks were hiding from the duck hunters along the river. I didn't blame them from being nervous at my approach.
I soon came to a small dam with chutes on either end. I went left and passed quickly through on a respectable cushion of water. I had no idea how I was going to get back up the dam on the return trip.
Just below that a log blocked most of the river. I found a path through on the left but had to pass under a lot of small branches. All sorts of creepy crawlies fell into the open cockpit.
This was followed by shoals spread all the way across the river. I scraped bottom all the way down. Sensing deeper water on the right, I made my way over there, only to have to fight to keep from being swept into a strainer. A limestone and clay wall five feet high and pockmarked with little caves and craters and dotted with moss protected one bank as I swept by.
Around the next bend the river narrowed to ten feet and was blocked off by piled up debris. As I sat there figuring what to do I got a whiff of a decaying deer caught in the branches. That did it. There were too many obstacles in too short a distance and I turned back. Too bad, this could have been a very pretty trip, particularly in the summer with some leaves on the trees.
I got back up the shoals with a fair amount of effort and a lot of poling, pushing and pulling and absolutely no style at all. Another boat load of creepy crawlies waited for me as I inched my way around the log laying across the river. When I got back to the dam I knew there was too much water coming through the chute I had come down. Over on the other side of the river I found too many rocks in that chute and had to get out and line up the dam.