Lake Bryan
Texas
This lake exists to cool a power plant, and somebody stocked it with saltwater redfish.
The water here has a job. It was impounded in nineteen seventy-four to cool the electrical generators at the Dansby Power Plant, and the local utility still manages the dam and the lake for exactly that purpose. On some maps it doesn't even get a proper name. It's just listed as Bryan Utilities Lake. Then somebody started adding fish. Largemouth bass and catfish and crappie, which you'd expect. Crappie, carp, tilapia, sunfish. Walleye, which belongs much farther north. And red drum, the redfish that anglers normally chase in salt water along the Gulf coast, swimming around in an industrial cooling pond a few miles from town. The borrowed water picked up a social life too. Texas A&M's rowing team trains here, along with the wakeboarding, sailing and cycling teams, and the rowers and sailors compete nationally. Mountain bike trails ring the shoreline. Houses line the banks close enough that the lake counts as its own place on the census.
Wayside reads this to you as you drive past, timed to arrive before the place does. Plan a route through here.
Fish present in Lake Bryan include largemouth bass, catfish, crappie, tilapia, carp, red drum, thread fin shad, walleye and sunfish.
Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
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