HOUSTON—Behind Lake Houston Marina, fishermen wander onto the piers every day, casting their lines into the water for a few catfish or perch or, if they’re lucky, an occasional bass.
They trade stories about who’s caught what along the shores of Lake Houston. And if you ask them, they’ll tell you stories about how low the water got last year.
"There was an island here," said Boni Enriquez, pointing out to the glassy smooth water. "An island! And over there, too, there was an island!"
Today, they can look across the lake to the distant shore seeing nothing but a few seagulls and cormorants flying above the water. Lake Houston, they will tell you, is back to normal.
The rains that have fallen upon Houston this year have pushed the city out of a crisis. The worst of the drought that drove Houstonians to avoid washing their cars and watering their lawns has passed. The city’s public works department says lake levels are either at or near normal.
A flight over Lake Conroe still shows some signs of the drought, with dry areas apparently below piers and docks and what look like islands of dry lakebed showing above the water line. But on Lake Houston, everyone from boaters to fisherman to police patrolling the water are relieved to report that the lake levels have risen dramatically.
That’s a relief to the people who run the Lake Houston Marina, who struggled through a difficult fall and winter.
"Before the water came back up and the temperatures rose, it was really slow," said Wayne Machann, the marina manager. "But the past couple of weeks, since the temperature warmed up and the water has come up, people are catching, especially, crappie …"
"So they’re excited," he said. "And that gets everybody out here fishing."
Wayne Hargraves, a retired oil services worker living in a mobile home near the lake, takes his boat onto the water nearly every day. He’s now catching catfish near a spot that was dry lakebed just a couple of months ago.
"We’d be on dry dirt," he said. "It’s eight-foot-deep right here. The lake was down eight foot here. We’d be on dry dirt."
Now, though, he laughs about his good fortune, joking that his children tried to convince him to move to Austin. Despite the recent rains, the lakes there are still low.
