Hello from a long time off and on lurker to your enclave of small-water piscatorial information. I'm a resident of East Texas with access to some family stock tanks that have been under the primary management of Mother Nature and Charles Darwin for the last ten years or so. The primary purpose of all of them is to provide surface water for cattle and wildlife. Fish are a distant second.
I'm a cattle nutritionist by trade and I enjoy the complexities of a big picture, systems-based approach to the management of a biological whole.
Just to make things harder than they need to be, I'm primarily a fly fisherman. Few things in life make me as happy as watching a largemouth bass cause a miniature water-based mushroom cloud under a bug I tied. I also enjoy some spirited light tackle bream busting.
Here are a couple of pictures of some of the water I am blessed enough to have access to and some of the fish that have come from it.
The picture below is from late February 2011.
This is a photo from a similar location on the bank in September of 2011.
This is all that was left of the 2-3 acres in September 2011. I assumed that the fishing would be pretty poor, if not non-existent if it ever rained again. The upper right corner of this picture is the spillway of this tank.
It finally did rain again, although no water has gone over the spillway since 2010.
Imagine my surprise in April of 2012 when I caught several of these:
In 2013, the hits still keep on coming.
I look forward to soaking up lots of new knowledge from you folks.
