Lake Fork fisheries biologist calls it a career after 33 years

Published 1:36 am Saturday, October 13, 2018

In 33 years with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, Kevin Storey’s career was like most of the agency’s fisheries biologists. Often working with too small of a budget, he had to juggle the desires of fishermen with the biological needs of the fisheries and within the constraints of the managing authority of a reservoir.

The one difference is that for the last 17 years, Storey did it under the bright spotlight as the lead biologist for Lake Fork. Every biologist has a lake or two that is regionally important, and there are some like Sam Rayburn, Toledo Bend and Falcon that draw national attention, but probably none have been as important to the promotion of Texas bass fishing year in and year out as Fork.

“Managing Lake Fork is probably the most challenging job of any biologist in Texas. Kevin had the right attitude and work ethic to handle this challenge. He had an array of talents and skills well suited to making fishing better,” said Spencer Dumont, TPWD Inland Fisheries Region 2 director.

Through the years, Storey worked with Lake Fork Sportsman’s Association in experimental projects to establish native habitat on the lake, was the point man at public state-of-the-lake meetings and instituted a trophy bass survey to help the department monitor a segment of the fishery that is otherwise hard to maintain a handle on.

“Kevin was instrumental in facilitating a 10-plus-year Lake Fork Trophy Bass voluntary reporting system, which provided interesting results to help inform our management decisions. This survey was one of the most robust and longest-running volunteer angler surveys on record,” said Craig Bonds, TPWD Inland Fisheries Division director.

Storey took something of an unusual path into freshwater fisheries management. A native of Barbados, his previous experience was with marine fisheries. His real introduction to freshwater fisheries came when he was hired as a fisheries technician in the department’s Waco office. This meant a learning curve for both the species he was working with and Texans. More on learning about Texas later.

A quiet man by nature, Storey downplays his role on Lake Fork.

“I would like to take credit for Fork, but we really haven’t done anything. We monitor it, but it is not like we are going in and tweaking and making large-scale changes,” said Storey, the fourth department biologist to manage the lake since its opening in 1980.

Storey said if he did anything at Fork it was doing nothing by defending the lake’s natural ability to be a trophy fishery and not bending to social pressure from one direction or the other.

“Making a mistake there can cause a biological harm and a financial harm,” Storey explained.

One of the many issues he faced was a push from marine owners to change regulations that would encourage more tournaments at Fork. At the same time, there was a pull from guides and individuals not to bend the rules for tournaments.

Noting there was already intense pressure on the lake’s bass fishery, Storey did not see the need to change the regulations. He added that managing the current level of fishing pressure was already a double-edged sword. He believes the delayed mortality from catch-and-release fishing helps offset the lack of bass harvest on the low end of the lake’s slot limit.

On the other hand, the amount of lures put in front of the fish each year has educated them to certain tactics — leaving fishermen to think the lake’s low catch rate is a sign the sky is falling. For that reason, Storey was elated in 2014 when Keith Combs won the Toyota Texas Bass Classic with a three-day record-setting 15-fish total of 110 pounds fishing crankbaits offshore.

There were calls for other regulation changes over the years, but Storey rejected endorsing them as well.

“It can take 10 to 15 years to make an impact, so it doesn’t do any good to change every two years or so,” he said.

One of the hardest issues Storey had to deal with at Lake Fork is the periodic disappearance of hydrilla. When it disappears, and biologists statewide do not understand why it happens, the department is blamed with having sprayed it or that it was killed as a byproduct of spraying efforts for water hyacinth and now giant salvinia.

“They think all herbicide kills all plants, but if that is the case why doesn’t it do it in your yard,” Storey said.

He once lamented he never understood why fishermen would think the agency would want to hurt a fishery it worked so hard to develop and protect.

Storey said the real vegetation problem at Lake Fork, like most other older constant level lakes, was exposed when the lake level dropped for the first time several years ago. That is a complete lack of vegetation along the shore to protect young fish and to create a spot to hold them for fishing.

While there are various projects at Fork and around the state to increase native vegetation in a lake, there is nothing available that could be ramped up for a reservoir the size of Fork.

Storey is glad to see the department putting more emphasis on other fish species in recent years.

“The effort is still lopsided to bass. That is no different than deer to Wildlife, but it is certainly changing especially with catfish. There is also some emphasis on survival of hybrids and stripers,” Storey said.

The increased emphasis on catfish is what led Storey and other biologists to do research that resulted in a trophy catfish on Lake Tawakoni while still leaving room for the traditional meat fishery.

Of course, not even good jobs are perfect. Storey said one of the biggest surprises he learned early about Texas was just how political TPWD management could be.

“When I first got into it, I had a preconceived notion that fisheries management wasn’t a place for politics. I didn’t want to be in place of people pulling strings and people putting in non-biological input. I found out I was a little more naïve,” he explained.

Although he said it is not as bad now as it was in the early years, he did always find the meddling of Texas Parks and Wildlife commissioners and politicians “a little distasteful.”

“I still look at it in a naïve way that it should be hands off, but there is a lot at stake, and they are powerful enough they do what they want to. But it is not like it used to be when you were told you have to do this and you have to do that,” he said.

Storey said the issue is public trust with fishermen.

“We tell ourselves and the public that we make decisions based on biology. It is hard to explain,” he said.