The Brazos continues to carve its mark on the earth as it did centuries before Comanche hunters followed its banks to the buffalo-hunting plains in the north.

Its life’s blood flows pure and clean, teaming with life, on a journey south to mingle with the salty waters of the Gulf. Born on the cross-timber plains of north Texas, the river winds unmolested — except for man-made monsters with names such as Whitney and Possum Kingdom — through country nearly as wild as when native Americans lived near its shores.

A drift through the stretch of the river below the Lake Whitney Dam can conjure up these images of the past. Watching an osprey glide along the white cliffs, it is easy to imagine a lone brave staring down, wondering who the strange invaders are. The spell may be broken by a slight movement — a deer or turkey living in the present.

“Our rivers are one of the few last vestiges of wilderness,” said Chris Shafer, professional fisherman and Brazos river rat. “Man can’t control rivers. Man usually gives rivers a wide berth.”

Spending much of the year chasing stripers on Lake Whitney, it is where the lake delivers the Brazos back to its limestone base that Shafer seems to belong.

“To float down that river and see crystal-clear water with fish swimming around in one to three feet of water — and you might be able to look over your shoulder and see a flock of turkeys fly by or a deer getting a drink of water at the edge of the river – you just don’t get a chance to see that in most places,” he said.

Shafer is the only human being who regularly spends time on the 8 1/2-mile stretch of river south of the Whitney dam. A float during the drier months requires taking to the river on foot and dragging his flat-bottom boat across shallows and gravel bars. The logistics are time consuming. The boat must be unloaded and the vehicle moved to higher ground in case water is discharged from the lake. A vehicle must be waiting on the other end. The trip can be grueling, but Shafer wouldn’t have it any other way.

“I can go down that river and not see another soul. It’s just me, my clients and the wildlife,” he said.

Shafer’s buddy, Paul Burford, has been down the river enough times to earn his whiskers as a river rat.

“To me, going down that river almost makes me think, ‘This is not much different than when the dinosaurs were roaming around here,’” Burford said.

But with all the solitude and beauty, it is the fishing that pulls at them the hardest.

“When I first started this, I told my clients, ‘The fish-catching part of this is gravy,’” Shafer said. “The heart and the meat of the matter is just going down the river and seeing the beauty and the majesty that the river provides. To see springs flowing down the limestone and hair ferns everywhere with huge cottonwoods and live oaks, it’s just incredible.”

“It’s the only place I have ever fished in my life where I catch a fish every time I go,” Shafer says of his river. “Every river is different, it has its own personality. The water in this river is so conducive for fish to be active and healthy.”

Burford has shared many a great day of fishing the Brazos with Shafer.

“Like Chris always tells you, a really bad day on the river is 10 fish,” Burford said.

Shafer points to several reasons why the water quality in the Brazos makes it such a good fishery. A body of water left relatively free of mankind’s “progress” is high on that list.

“There is no major industry on the Brazos River from this point to the headwaters of the river,” Shafer explained. “The only business on the river is agribusiness. There is virtually no pollution.”

And the limestone base also acts as a natural filter to leech out impurities that do make it into the water. The river is also continually fed fresh spring water as it flows to the south.

A first-time visitor to the river can’t help but wonder how the skinny water can hold so many fish. There are pools that seem to have no more room for the myriad of species that call the river home. Catfish, carp, drum, gar, buffalo and shad – in sizes that seems to defy the depth of the pools they inhabit – are visible all along a float down the Brazos, along with the smallmouth, largemouth and spotted bass coveted by anglers. Clouds of bream, juvenile bass and river minnows inhabit long, flat stretches where the vegetation offers protection from predators. Shafer says oxygen and cool water allow the river to not only grow numbers of fish, they allow them to grow to trophy sizes and make them active, eager to take an angler’s offering.

“You have a small volume of water that is constantly being exposed to the air,” he explained. “That water is oxygenated evenly throughout the entire body of water. Dissolved oxygen dictates how active fish are.”

The springs that continually feed pure water into the river also affect the temperature.

“This river is also fed by springs which keeps the water temperature down even in the hot summer.” Shafer says. “The cooler the water, the more dissolved oxygen it can retain.”

Visibly apparent to the first-time drifter is the wealth of forage in the water. An abundance of plankton supports the smaller fish, creating plenty of food for larger predators. It’s the nature of how fish feed in flowing water that make them susceptible to the fisherman. Fish in lakes continually stay close to schools of bait fish they feed on. River fish aren’t afforded that convenience.

“It’s like human beings, we have a refrigerator stocked full of food. We don’t have that incessant need to go out and kill something to eat, because we know we can just sashay into the kitchen and get a bite,” Shafer said. “The river is like a conveyor belt; it is constantly bringing food and nutrients downstream. A bite in the river is a bite of opportunity. Some of the biggest fish we have caught down there have been at two or three o’clock in the afternoon.”

The river fish knows instinctively that he must seize the moment.

“The largemouths and the spotted bass are indigenous; they have been here since there has been a river.” Shafer explained. “The smallmouths escaped the impoundment here at Lake Whitney.”

Despite it’s non-native status, the smallmouths have been introduced to “classic smallmouth habitat.”

“If you got on a plane and flew to Canada to go fishing for river smallmouths, it would look almost identical to this river … just 70 miles south of Dallas,” Shafer said.

A longer growing season allows Texas smallmouths to reach sizes that would trigger oohs and awhs in Canada. On May 7, 1997, Shafer caught a 7-pound smallie that remains the record for the river. Burford’s biggest, a 5.95-pounder, was caught in October of ’97.

“I am convinced, and I think Chris is too, that there is an eight-plus pound smallmouth in the river,” Burford surmised.
And not only are the fish big, they bring a lot of fight to the table.

“River fish are stronger,” Shafer said. “They have to maintain themselves in a current. No matter whether the current is minimal or there is a full discharge from the dam, they still have to negotiate the current.”

He compares the lake fish to a person who sits on the couch all day, and the river fish to the guy who gets up and jogs every morning. “They are just solid muscle,” he says of the jogging fish.

Combine the muscular fish with water conditions that keep the fish’s metabolism at an optimum, and the current creates “The fight of your life.”

“We use light tackle because of the water clarity,” Shafer said. “There is nothing like it in the world.”

In recent months, Shafer, friends and clients have caught most of their fish on small buzzbaits. Shafer likes spinning tackle and sticks with “finesse baits” in the river.

“We’ll use No. 1 and No. 2 hooks with soft plastics like western worms and skirted grubs with 1/16 once weights,” he said. “The forage that is in this river is smaller than in a lake.”

Shafer finds fish holding near structure when the current is strong. Fish use breaks in the flow to conserve energy. But when the flow is minimal, as it has been through a recent drought, bass can be found cruising the flats in search of food. This is what has made the buzzbaits so effective this fall.

“We had a phenomenal buzzbait bite this year,” he recalled. “Brad Eklund (a friend and client from Grapevine) and I went down the river and caught 40 fish, all on buzzbaits.”

On an October float, Burford took 21 fish, eight of which were smallmouths. Four topped out at over three pounds.
“I’m not saying that you are going to catch giant fish every time you go, or a bunch of smallmouths,” Shafer conceded. “But that is the beauty of the river. Not only do you never know what you are going to catch, but the river always keeps you from getting bored because it is always changing. The current is always cutting a new ditch here and a new gravel bar there.”
Shafer even found one of his best friends on the river.

“We had pulled up to launch one morning, and there was this old red hound dog down there on the river bottom,” he recalled. “I never petted him; I never said boo to him.”

The dog, apparently abandoned, began to follow Shafer and his two clients down the river.
“I’m not talking about running along banks, I mean in the river swimming behind the boat,” Shafer said. “I asked my customers, ‘Did y’all feed that dog anything?’”

The two men said no, and that they hadn’t even petted the dog. Shafer thought the dog would eventually tire and “give up the ghost.”

“ I jokingly said, ‘Dog, if you make it down to the other end of this thing, I’ll take you home with me.” he laughed. “Well, he must have heard what I said, because he never gave up.”

When the party would slow down to fish, the dog would try to get into the boat.

“I even ran over him with my trolling motor,” Shafer said. “If I had had a video camera, I could have made a Walt Disney movie that would have jerked every heart string of anybody who ever saw it. There would have been crocodile tears everywhere.”

Shafer thought he had lost the dog as it was following on the bank and came to a 15-foot cliff.

“I thought that was the end of him, but lo and behold, he just jumped off of it,” he shook his head. “He hit the ground, rolled off in the water and here he comes.”

But a final life-threatening obstacle stood in the pooch’s way.

“During the summer months, they turn the generators on between two and four o’clock in the afternoon to provide water to the rice farmers downstream,” Shafer explained. “We were almost to the end, and he was getting real tired. He was trying to climb over this brush pile, and he fell down into it and got hung.”

The water was rising as the dog cried for help.

“He was baying, and my heart got the best of me. If I didn’t get him out of that brush pile, he was going to drown.”

Shafer climbed into the waist-deep water and rescued the dog. He laid it at his clients feet in the boat.

“He had cuts from one end to the other,” Shafer recalls. “I laid him in the boat and he never moved a muscle.”
Shafer and his wife Leslie took him to the vet where he was patched up. Today, “River” is one of the first to greet visitors to their business and home, usually with a tennis ball, ready to play.

“Now, he is our social director at Little Rocky Lodge,” Shafer laughed.

Contact Chris Shafer at Little Rocky Lodge on Lake Whitney (254) 622-3010.