A 94-year-old angler has another great fish story to tell
Moses Lopez spent his early days hunting with a slingshot.
He mostly bagged rabbits and squirrels and was handy with a rod and reel as well.
“I’d tag along with my brother,” Lopez said. “That’s where I learned to hunt and fish.”
It was during the Depression in the 1930s, and Lopez lived in Winnie just east of Galveston Bay with his mother, four brothers and two sisters. Besides hunting and fishing, he found odd jobs and worked in the fields, planting and harvesting crops, doing whatever he could to help out.
“My father had passed away when I was 12,” Lopez said, “and we had a family to feed.”
Now a spry 94 years old, Lopez doesn’t hunt anymore — “that’s too much work” — but he still loves to fish.
“I’ll fish whenever I can find someone to go with me,” Lopez said.
He’s put away a few stories over 80-plus years of dropping lines, but few rival the one that he told a couple of weeks ago.
Fishing Aug. 22 with grandson Nicholas Griffin near Harbor One Marina at Eagle Mountain Lake Lopez said it had been an uneventful day as he cast his line toward the docks.
He felt a little tug, but then the line held.
“I thought it was stuck on a stump,” Lopez said, “but then it took off. It was fast.”
The black bass was a fighter and shot out of the water, giving them a glimpse of its size.
“He was big,” Lopez said. “Both me and my grandson knew that. He said, ‘That’s a big fish!’”
As he maneuvered the fish near the boat, it spit out the Bandit lure — but Nicholas had a net in position and grabbed the largemouth.
“He was so big you could put your fist in his mouth,” Lopez later told his son, Ray Lopez.
Lopez had an electronic scale, but the batteries were low, so after measuring it — 231/2 inches long — and taking a few photos, he turned to Nicholas.
“That was a thrill, but it’s time to turn him loose,” Lopez said.
“I figure it was about 91/2 or 10 pounds,” Lopez said. “That’s the biggest fish I’ve caught that wasn’t a striper or catfish.”
‘I’ve always loved fishing’
After Ray Lopez told his father that the record for a black bass at Eagle Mountain Lake was 11.65 pounds, Lopez suggested that he might have turned loose a trophy.
“I guess I’ll have to go back out there and catch him again,” Lopez told his son. “After all, I k