Pond Boss Forums MANAGING AN EXISTING POND Evaluating and adjusting fish populations 8 Acre Trophy Pond Stocked Tiger Bass. Need Help

My pond is 5 years old. It was made and stocked to be a trophy bass pond. It was stocked with Tigerbass from American Sportfish in Alabama. I put 12,000 Bream, 15,000 Fathead minnows and 10,000 shad in it 1.5 years before the bass were put in. The bream are fed daily. To start with the bass was really really aggressive. That lasted up until about 1.5 to 2 years ago. Now I can not hardly catch a bass on a bait. They seam to have lost there aggressiveness. They will not hit a artificial lure. I have caught some 6+ pounders out of it. I see the bass chasing shad all the time but they are uncatchable. The pond is fertilized to maintain the water clarity. I was using a management program but now I can not manage it properly because I can not get them to bite a lure. 2 years ago I also put Talapia in the pond to give the bass something else to eat. Of course they all died off in the winter.

The bream are doing really good. They are all of different sizes from hatch lings to 8-10 inches.

The shad is also thriving very well. They are all ways schooling and get hammered by the bass.

I am going to lime it in a couple of weeks to get the acidity back right. Not sure if that will help the bite though ?

I have also been told by the people that Manage Bear Lake in Washington County Alabama that the Tigerbass will loose it aggressiveness if they do not have any competition fro food and the food is plentiful. They told me to add striped bass to the pond to give the tigerbass competition and they would become very aggressive again and very catch able again. They did that in there lake and it is a awesome lake to fish in. There tigerbass are very very aggressive.

I need some help on what to do ? If I can not do something to change there aggressiveness so that they will bit a lure again then I am going to end up with a very out of balance pond with the bass.

Please help !!!

Tried different sized lures? Lures that look like your shad?
How about netting a good passel of those shad and go live bait?

DNickolaus. We have tried all shapes, sizes and colors of lures and none of them will work very good. I can throw something on and catch a fish first cast and then after that nothing not even another bite on it. No I have not tried live bait yet. That is my next thing to try. I mean I am pretty sure that will land some bass. Tigerbass however are suppose to hit anything no matter what and stay very very aggressive. Which was the case fro a couple of years but not anymore.

MB, I am not one of the Big Brains here with extensive expertise, so take everything I say with a ton of salt. Certainly you need to hear from folks who really know fisheries before making any changes!

That said, here's my two cents: When bass get big, they get harder to catch on artificial lures. This is especially true of Florida bass but it is generally true for all LMB types.

HSB may indeed compete for open water shad, but from what you say the Tigers already chow down on them.

Perhaps you could consider adding Northern strain LMB. They are more aggressive & will compete with the Tigers directly for food. I've heard that this forces Florida bass to be more aggressive, though I've never seen definitive research proving that.

They will crossbreed with your Tigers, of course, so you will go from F1 to Fx in your BOW. You will have to judge whether that is something you can live with, but in your shoes I'd sure consider the Northerns.

Otherwise, I suspect there is no alternative to live bait fishing. That can be fun, so I'm not knocking it, but it isn't everyone's cup of tea.

Please let us know how it goes. I'm in the process of getting my own pond built in east Texas and have considered Tigers myself, so am very interested in your results!

Your pond sounds like what has happened on my local lake....The last 3 to 4 years..September comes and the creeks are blacked out with bait fish. You can throw a crankbait and bring in snagged shad every cast. The bass are there, feeding agressively, but are almost impossible to catch. Your bait, is just one in a million among the bait fish. Their is no reason the bass should key in on your bait vs the live bait. The bait explosion has been great for size, but has made it harder to catch them.

Anthropic.

I agree with you that LMB do get less aggressive the bigger they get. However with the Tigerbass which is a crossbreed between a Northern and a Florida bass it is suppose to stay just as aggressive at 8lbs as it is at 1lb. Adding another type of bass is not what I want to do.

The Tiger's do chow down on the shad. There is so much forage food in the BOW that they do not have to stay aggressive for food. IT is right there for them. Which is how we built the lake and wanted it to be so that we could grow Trophy LMB. We went with Tigerbass because of all of the good things that we had heard about them gaining a lot of weight quickly and staying very aggressive no matter there size.

With food being so plentiful in the BOW is why I have been thinking about adding sterile Striped Bass to the lake to give the Tigerbass some competition and forcing them to have to compete for food.

MB,

Are you thinking of adding HSB or actual striped bass? If striped bass, do you have a source for sterile striped bass?

Bill D

Whichever one I can find in my area. I would assume that it would be HSB. However I do not believe that a Striped Bass can reproduce in a Pond or lake anyway. I think that they need running water or a lot of current to be able to reproduce. I could be wrong though. I want sterile to keep them from becoming to populated in the lake.

I have also been told that Striped bass will die off after a few years since there is no current in the lake.

The other thing is how many to put in the pond per acre and the size that needs to be put in.

Manchesterbass, I am a new pond owner so I can not speak of your pond but I can tell you of my bass fishing experience. And I have a lot of that. Let me say that in Texas over the past 30 yr's there has been a lot of lakes built. And most of them follow with your experience. Lake Fork,(an example) most everyone has herd of. So I will tell u that in the beginning I could go there and catch 100 per day, all in the 2lb range, and catch them on everything I threw at them. And maybe catch a 5lb or better. The lake was stocked with Florida's. And a few years later I would catch fewer but bigger fish and today even fewer but now some really big ones. My point is that the bass learn what not to bite. It is a fact that bass learn not to bite. So if there has been some fishing pressure on the lake, I suspect they have learned and like you said there is a lot of natural forage for them, so that also will come into play. I would suggest u fish more plastic's like worms, lizards, craws. Or naturals, like suggested above. And I think you are headed in the right direction to add Hybred stripers. Good luck with your fishery. Maybe someone here will make better recommendations for you.

Tracy

You may not have a problem. I always follow the old recommendation - identify the bait/forage and use it.

The only thing I'd recommend is grabbing a shad and putting it on a hook and sail it to an area you know or believe your bass to be. Then enjoy the ride.

Why try anything else? If you see them busting shad, why throw a worm or spinnerbait? They're eating the shad, toss in a shad.


There is a pond I fish, and the pressure is actually very high. A 1 acre pond that has on average 10 people fishing it 6 days each week. That is some pressure. And the majority of these people are using every artificial lure/bait/prop known to fisherman. These fish have seen it all. Because people buy a lure at the local bait shop, walk to the pond, and zip it in. I've fished shoulder to shoulder with guys using $500 setups chucking out $20 lures for hours without even a strike. And I'm beside them with my $40 setup dropping in what I know these bass eat daily, and I'm landing bass, big bass, every day I fish that pond. NOTE that I fished the pond 3 times, using all sorts of lures, not a single strike. The third time I noticed the bass boil and went over, fished out a minnow, put it on my line and within 5 minutes landed a 5.75lb largemouth. Since them I don't waste my time with anything but what I know these bass eat. So for you, I would put live shad on and be happy. Then if yer bored throw in some swimbaits that are very life-like and see how that pans out.

If your bass are eating shad every day, why would they chase anything else, or even look at anything else. They are a few years old, they know what they've been eating, and what they like and it is in abundance in their home. So they're chowing down on the shad.

basslover is right about fishing with what they r feeding on. And I forgot to mention the reason why I recommended the plastic worms is study showed that bass never learn not to bite them over other baits they learn not to bite.

Tracy

Striped bass cannot reproduce in ponds and 99% of lakes for that matter.

HSB are not sterile. They can reproduce but only a small number of ponds, say 1 in 10,000.

I doubt adding HSB would increase catch rates for your LMB. You likely have hook smart LMB with full bellies. Makes for some tough fishing.

I have no advise but I am watching this closely. I think this a relatively common issue. Almost the opposite of the common overcrowded small bass.

I hope this issue is discussed in detail. It highlights an issue of maintaining a bass pond over time with respect to growth, population, and catchability. I would love to hear recommendations other than initial RW gains and how to maintain such a pond over 5, 10, 20 years!

And it makes one lean toward a put-and-take HBG / HSB pond with supplemental feeding where you can have a bit more control over the fish in there and how hungry the are!

Program the feeders to turn off on Thursdays for a weekend fishing trip.

The more times a LMB gets it's lips ripped off by a bait, the less inclined they are to bite it again. The older the fish, the more bad experiences it's had.

Fluorocarbon line, lighter line, matching the hatch with the most realistic bait you can, and if that fails, like was said, use live bait.

How many acres is the pond, and how many pounds of LMB do you harvest every year?

One thing I will add is to the fishing method is snap swivels... I see so many people posting photos of the fish they caught and directly above their bait is a snap swivel. To uneducated, lightly fished fish, it's no big deal. However, to fish that have been caught a time or two before, that snap swivel is a good way to keep from catching them... If you like the snap, use the smallest one you can in line with the pound test you are using and skip the swivel. Few baits really need a swivel. However most baits really don't need a snap either. The Rapala knot is great for allowing a jig or other bait movement on the line, but not having the addition of a snap. Look up how to tie it on-line.

Hey, MB. Maybe I'm mistaken, but I seriously doubt that any LMB, whether northern, florida, tiger, f1, fx, etc, will bite as readily as a wily old 8 lb lunker as when they were a foolish 1 lb young'un. For one thing, a big one has had more bad experiences with artificial lures over the years. For another, the most aggressive bass are the first to get caught & harvested, while the least aggressive survive long enough to get big.

The Tiger strain is genetically disposed to be more aggressive than Florida bass, but I will bet Tigers also get more lure shy when they get big. Less shy than Floridas, maybe, but more shy than when they were young and small.

Hope I'm wrong. If so, I will go Tiger Bass all the way when stocking!

Tiger bass will get hook shy as well. Now if a pond is never fished, an 8 pound bass will be no more hook shy than a 1 pound bass. Growing up, my friend's dad bought a property with a 4 acre pond on it. The pond was about 15 years old and had never been fished when purchased. The previous owners built it for aesthetics, stocked it but never had any interest in fishing it and apparently never allowed anyone else to fish it. The first couple years of fishing it were insane. Every bass, from the largest 12 pounder to the oodles of 1 pound stunted bass were as dumb as bricks. Within a couple years, the fish got smart.

IMO. I would think the forage that is in the lake may play a roll in the hook shy part too. Bass that target bluegill as the main forage fish would most likely target bluegill baits, same for bass in another lake that mainly prey on crawfish would hit crawdad style baits. A lake that has bluegill, shad, crawfish, tilapia, trout, GSH, etc would be willing to hit different styles and colors of baits.

esshup

The lake is 8 acres. It was built to be a trophy bass pond as you can see from the below description plus the fish amounts in stocking in my original post. We try to take out at least 100# a year or anything under 17 inches we now keep. It goes up each year. The problem is that we can not catch the quota because we can not even catch the smaller younger fish anymore.

Tried lightweight line, small lures and forgae look a like lures. Nothing seams to work.

It has 2 different slopes on it. On one side it is 2 fett and 4 feet and on the other it is 3 feet and 6 feet. It also has tees with cuts built into it coming off of the bank going out into the deeper water. The top of the dirt level is a dozier blade wide and about 5-6 feet deep. It also has a shallow end. Has some points and guts in it and a island 30X30.

The bass was so so aggressive in the beginning that I could catch 2 at a time on a crankbait but now I can throw plastics, spinnerbaits, crankbaits, spoons and swimbaits. It does not matter they just will not bite. Not even the young bass that I need to take out of the pond for management purposes.

It has become very frustrating for me for sure.

I understand what a lot of you guys are saying about them getting hook shy as they get older.

The thing is even the younger fish that we try to harvest for management purposes will not bite a lure at all. I might catch one on a lure on the first cast and after that will not get another bite on that lure for the rest of the trip. That is what is so hard to understand.

I have not seen anybody comment about the liming part of my post yet ?

Do yall think that might turn the bite back on ?

Thinking of adding some crawfish to the lake ? Anybody know where I can get some at a very good price ? Also what kind is best ?

I know that will turn the bite on for a little while at least. THey should hit anything that is red for a month or so.

How many years back was the aggressive striking and landing?

What is the water clarity - are you casting far enough the bass cannot see you?

If you know your bass are hitting live shad, is there a reason you're not fishing with live shad as your bait?

You've said you see them hitting shad, but you haven't said if you use shad as bait - only that the artificial lures aren't producing as you want them to. I don't understand this part - if I knew a species of fish was hitting something as bait, I would use that bait or something that is as close to that bait as possible.

What are the WR of the younger bass you catch? My thinking is this "might" tell you how many of the small ones you have. Are you sure that there are a lot of small ones to take out? With this, could it be possible that your larger bass are now focusing on the small bass because the shad aren't a big enough meal for them? Their dwindling numbers could be why its hard to catch those now.

Possibly WR ratio isn't even a good indicator since there is so much forage the small bass will always be fine size-wise. Still, those big LMB might be culling the small bass.

Basslover

The aggressive striking was up till about 2 years ago.

Water clarity stays between 18-24 inches. Depending on when fertilized.

There is no reason that I have not fished with live shad yet. I have been meaning to do it I just have not had the chance to yet as I am not at home a lot of the time.

I have tried swimbaits that is the closest thing to a shad. Can catch one fish on the 1st or second cast then after that nothing.

I don't want my fish to be able to only be caught on live bait. Especially when I know others that have stocked the same way that I have and they tearing them up on artificial lures and the bass are staying really aggressive.

I want to try to figure out the issues I am having so that I can correct it.

fish n chips

I had the lake electroshock-ed last year and the outcome of it was that I needed to take the smaller fish out. Anything under 17-18 inches. There was a abundance of those fish in the lake. The weight was very good on those fish though. They are all like little footballs man.

My problem is not being able to catch them out .