Sports

The Wills Point Tiger high school athletic program kicked into high-gear Aug. 1 with the first official two-a-day workouts of the year for student-athletes competing in football, volleyball, cross country and tennis.

I remember well my first time to fish for wild trout in a Colorado stream. I was about 30 years old and a couple buddies and I had made arrangements with a rancher to do a 3-day drop camp hunt for mule deer on his ranch near Silverton. When we arrived, the rancher had the camp all set up complete with a supply of aspen wood for the wood stove. It gets chilly in the mountains in October! When making plans for our drop camp, he asked if we liked to fish and the answer was a resounding YES! He mentioned a little stream that traversed his property that was full of brook trout.

Each summer since the release of information about Northern giant hornets being found in Washington state in 2020, Texas A&M AgriLife entomologists have been inundated with questions and reported sightings.

Everything in the natural world serves a purpose. That purpose might not always be easy to identify but everything from a lowly earthworm to a giraffe fits into a unique slot in the big scheme of things. Take the mesquite tree for instance, to many ranchers it’s just a needless plant that sucks water from the soil and quickly covers land that could be used for grazing cattle. But the tree also has long served many useful purposes for man. It’s been proven that the beans and roots of the mesquite tree made up over 20 percent of the diet of Native Americans living in the southwest, especially in Texas where 70 percent of mesquite trees grow. Mesquite furnishes shade for livestock and habitat for wildlife. It provides food and cover for many bird species, white-tail and mule deer, feral hogs and many small mammals native to Texas.

As guide Brandon Sargent eased his big guide boat out of the breakwaters at Sapphire Bay Marina on Lake Ray Hubbard, the sun was just beginning to light up the eastern sky. Mike Ray, the manager of the marina and I were eagerly anticipating the red hot crappie bite Brandon and his customers had been enjoying the past few days. Our plan was to get on the water early while the temperature was still pleasant, catch our fish and be back at dock my mid morning.

I’m about to open a box of worms with this week’s column (pun intended). I love catching and eating what I and most folks call ‘perch’ or bream. Light tackle, a long shank ‘perch’ hook, a box of worms and we are ready to go ‘perch’ fishing, right? Come to find out, to properly categorize the fish we are targeting, we are about to go fishing for ‘sunfish’.

The Wills Point High School Athletic Department continued to stay busy last week, hosting its annual basketball camp at the high school. Entering the new week, coaches will turn their attention towards other camps including baseball, softball and football.

I have had a lifelong love of catching catfish and… eating them! I guess my passion for catfish comes naturally, as a boy growing up on a poultry farm in Red River County; catching catfish was a way of life. Every nine weeks or so when the chickens sold, we would pack up the old 1950 International Pick Up with tarps, Coleman stoves, cast iron skillets, bedding, etc and head up to a little lake in southeast Oklahoma that was chock full of channel catfish. I would begin catching bait, small perch from out farm pond, the day before. Upon arriving at our fishing hotspot, the drill was to set up camp quickly, which was easy to do, we had no tent, just tarps or, as they were called back then ‘wagon sheets’. Tarps on the ground with blanket served as bedding.