Pond Boss Forums STOCKING A NEW POND Types of fish to choose The White Bass / Sand Bass Plan

Now you all my call me nuts on this one but if I do get my new property and if the ground is right to do add the 2 acre pond I want and IF I can fund the second pond and IF the ground is right enough to go very deep in about a 1/10 th acre area of it (14 feet deep) I am planning to experiment with white bass.

Why you ask? Because based on where they live and my years here of chasing them I believe they will handle heat better then HSB and I do know of one case of White Bass spawning in a 1.5 acre pond in Texas which totally surprised the owner and me.

This is a guy who much like my first pond ownership experience, just kind of got lucky and found a place with a pond on it he could afford. He lives near the Brazos and fishes it almost every day in the summer. He started tossing in big Bluegill from the Brazos trips and then figured heck why not toss some sandbass in? Figured what could it hurt.

Now he has YOY white bass! Shocked, I was, I never thought they would spawn in a pond. So I went down with him and we took his little boat on the pond with my fish finder and took a look at the bottom of his pond. Here is what we found.

The pond is typical for Texas in most of its area nice gentle slopes then a drop to 5-6 feet a few spots 8-9 feet but just off center there is about a 70 x 50 that is mostly over 12 feet with some spots at 13 and I would guess with the pond full it would add another foot to the depth.

Then with in this 70 x 50 area there is about a 4' hump that is almost dead center of the deep spot so the water there is about 10-11 feet.

When I saw this I had an ah-ha moment!

We tossed down a bell anchor, drug it on the hump and pulled her up and just as I thought there were a few pieces of gravel in the anchor.

Here is why I figued that would be the case. I fish a lake called Joe Pool for sandies it is small for a DFW lake only about 7800 acres lots of pleasure boats and was built for black bass so lots of stumps. That leaves only about 20% of the lake where you can consistantly find sandies. The creeks flowing into Joe Pool are slow moving and muddy so the sandbass do not consider them spawing creeks. Yet Joe Pool has a great population of Sandies and due to the lake having no HSB or SP to compete and even none of the dreaded little yellow bass it is in my opinion one of the best Sandie lakes in the area.

The fish are not the biggest because the shad are healthy but the lake is really clear so it limits shad survival. Most keeper fish are 11-13 inches and the lake record was a nice fish but one that you might catch three of any day on Tawakoni or say Richland Chambers. Yet the white bass thrive and if you really work for them you could pull a limit any day. My buddy Howell guides all summer long and never dents the population even though 90% of his clients take fish home for the fryer and most of his groups are 2-3 anglers.

So just where are these fish in Joe Pool spawning? Well as some may or may not know in Texas most sandies act like little football shaped salmon each spring and go up streams to spawn by the thousand. People with out boats pack the banks and harvest them happy for the easy pickings. About 60 days of this action max occurs each year but not in the muddy slow creeks on Joe Pool. It is very rare to catch a sandie in those creeks.

On the lake there are several good humps that produce fish at various times of the year with slabbing, hell-pet and tail hummers, etc. Three of them are gravel humps and you guessed it in the spawn you can pull fish off those three humps ever day with slabs. They are spawing on those gravel humps. To quote the movie Jurassic Park, “nature will always find a way”.

So what I realized is my river buddy had a tiny mini Joe Pool lake for his pond and the white bass were performing the same way. Now some do die in the heat each summer but many survive. So I have always wondered if you built this configuration on purpose what would happen to a white bass population.

I figure with a lake over 2 acres you have a lot more water to work with and one good deep area with a gravel hump built with the end in mind may really serve the purpose well. I also thought about this, build one steep bank and deep spot close to shore and put a dock that extends to the deep spot. What I have noticed at Joe Pool is during the heat of summer mid day it is hard to find fish on the humps, but there is a bridge in about 20 feet of water and you find whites in around that shade all through mid day then when the heat breaks they go back to their beloved humps. So I figure if I give them some deep water shade in a pond they might use it in a pond too.

Now I don’t know if this will work and I am at least a year away from even beginning construction but I do have a high belief it could work and be a very unique pond. My main sport species in such a pond would be CC, BG and of course white bass. Since coming here I have learned about Tilapia and would use them as a forage species along with an attempt to establish some golden shiners which may be possible because they will out grow the ability of the WB to eat them at about 6 inches leaving only the CC as a preditor for them and many would even out grow them.

Now of course shad would be ideal but my understanding is it is very difficult to get them established in a pond and you really need a good bloom to get them going. Still I would give the shad a shot and be at peace with the results. Additionaly minnows should do well lacking the black bass. On the gills I would stock male fish about 4 to 1 over females and add bass to control them only as needed and on the bass I would go with all males to control their exact number and use them only as a bluegill control until I got a feel for how the sandies relate to the gills as food, my instinct is they would not eat them once over say 3 inches max.

A few HSB could be added to handle the bigger bait fish as needed, feeding the gills and the cats would do a good job on getting them bigger and as a last resort controlling gills is not that hard. The recipie is simple, bread and a cast net! If you have to many gills trust me a 20 dollar WalMart cast net can send 500 to the garden beds as fertilizer really swiftly.

I think white bass could be an excellent pond fish if the pond is managed with them in mind. What they need is some deeper water, good baitfish populations and a place to escape the heat along with gravel bottoms to spawn in. I am no pond expert but I really know white bass habits well as I have spent the last two years chasing them on many lakes through all four seasons. It just seems most of what they need can be provided.

They have some real advantages too as I see it anyway.

One, They are stupid! I mean this in a nice way, catching them is easy finding them is the trick, once you find them you can catch them. This make them easy to catch and easy to control with rod and reel if the population grows to fast.

Two, They are excellent eating and I know about 3 dozen ways to cook them from fried, to what we call “on the half shell” to wrapped in bacon and grilled. Should I need to really thin them out some day eating them will not be a chore.

Three, They only live about 4-5 years in perfect environments which means that even a well fed and well kept population would be some what self limiting aiding control.

Four, I know they can survive and breed because someone did it (all be it by accident) already.

I also think this won’t leave me with much of a down side if it does fail. Say I stock a bunch of WB and they all die at some point or dwindle and don’t grow and thrive nor spawn. Oh darn, now I have a 2 acre pond with deep gravel humps, excellent structure, a thriving CC cat population, male heavy blue gill population, a few well grown male LMB cruising the weeds and a deep water dock all waiting for any other preditor I want to add.

Things could be much worse. I guess what I am saying is I tried to make this plan to really mitigate any risk.

So that is my dream pond mainly cause I like to be different, I just do. For instance when I hunt I shoot a 16 gauge shot gun and a 35 Whelen is my rifle. Why I just can’t stand being like everyone else.

So what do ya’ll think, am I nuts or do I have any of you scratching your chins going, “hmm, white bass I wonder””

Yes, you can have a pond with white bass fishing. Norm Kopecky has proven again and again that non-traditional species can be enjoyed in ponds.

The question is less "can white bass survive and reproduce in a pond" than it is "can white bass thrive in a pond".

HSB will eat pellets like crazy--I'm not sure if WB will. This leaves you with the challenge of taking a pelagic predator like a white bass and having them thrive without pelagic opportunity. If you can do it, then great, I'd like to hear about it. But I'm skeptical about smaller water bodies. Unless you're willing to do a tremendous amount of supplemental stocking, I'd be surprised if you can covert naturally available energy, in the form of sunlight, into white bass biomass. White bass are inefficient at utilizing bluegill, so you'd almost certainly need to find a way to get a high density gizzard shad population established.

Think of it this way. If you're going to take out biomass from a pond (harvest fish), then you have to replenish it. There's only two ways to do this. Stock more fish (pain in the butt, long term) or let mother nature push biomass up the web from algae to zooplankton to smaller fish to piscovores (white bass). I think that a two acre pond cannot sustain enough white bass growth to provide anything more than an occasional bonus white bass, that's probably in poor body condition.

Norm Kopecky is a good expert on this sort of thing. He adds various species, including Morone to his pond for large amounts of enjoyment to the people that fish it. I think he would be the first to admit that the white bass don't put on a tremendous amount of weight in his system.

I'd love it if you prove me wrong. I've been a white bass afficionado since I was a little tyke. They're great.

Given the relative size of WB and GS, would threadfins be a better forage?

Good point.

Jack, you appear to have the same idea that I have had. Namely, that sand bass need running water to spawn. Not so. There are various recorded cases of them spawning on windswept gravel banks.

Will they do it very often? I doubt it.

I think you can keep them alive and even growing in a pond setting. But I doubt that they will ever rival the HSB as a pond fish. They just don't have the growth potential. I think both will be a put and take fish.

It may could be done if there are only threadfins and WB. As you say, plenty of plankton for the filter feeding of THS. The amount of shad needed would pretty much shut down excess BG survival. Golden shiners could help, but would stay in shallower water and help feed the CC and larger BG. CC would help control larger GS.
Bruce, do you know the approx. conversion rate of WB vs. the HSB of 2 to 1?

bm, I think of conversion rate as artificial feed conversion, so I don't know if there is a corollary for WB. Actually for fish, conversion ratio is a misnomer, because you are figuring a dry feed weight to a wet body mass weight, so 2:1 is actually a dry to dry conversion of something like 15:1, which isn't as good as a natural THS to WB ratio of 10:1.

Does that make any sense whatsoever?

That makes perfect sense, Bruce. I would think WB and HSB would have similar live prey conversion rates, huh?
I think a lot more fun could be had with BG, HSB and a few CC, but obviously, Jack has been around the block and is looking for more of a challenge. Good luck, Jack, and please keep us posted when you get busy with your project.

Well here is what I think so far,

I don't mean to sound in poor tone in any way so please no one take it that way, but what I honestly believe is I don't know if it will work and neither does anyone else. I would say this is because no one has really tried to do it.

My feeling is that the worst thing that will happen is my white bass will act like small Hybrids and not spawn, if so they will only live a few years and either I will eat them and they will die. If so no problem like I said I will end up with the ability to add some other top preditor and I do plan to go with some HSB anyway.

I mean I don't plan to put a ton of these things in just some and then watch what happens and try to make things to their liking. The good news is that I may soon have a far larger pond then I expected to under construction look for my post under questions and observations for more on that.

I do think they will do it often because the lake we fish, Joe Pool it is exactly how they are spawning there and it is heavily fished and sand bass are heavily harvested and yet they continue to get better every year.

The state has not stocked them in 10 years so they have to be comming from somewhere. Trust me I have fished this lake for a long time and fished the creeks running into it. I can tell you almost none of them EVER go up the creek.

They do spawn on the wind blown points IF the points have gravel on them, that is the real key. Joe Pool happens to have a creek channel running along the three big humps we pull them off during the spawn, early in the spawn the females are full of eggs.

The do spawn some on the points too but mostly the gravel humps. I am telling you during the spawn peak you almost can't let the slab hit the bottom with out picking up a sandie.

The real question is can it be done in a pond? I don't know, like I said my friend Brian has them spawning in his pond south of Granbury, the adults are healthy but it is not proven by any streach long term yet.

One thing I do know is if sand bass are hungry they will go where ever bait is. Shallow, deep, fast water or slow, find the bait find the sandies.

At the end of spring for instance we consistantly catch them in about 6 feet just beyound the weed beds in the evenings just before dark. The shad move near the mouth of the marina and the sandies follow.

They key is now that it looks like I might be able to build a 7-8 acre lake is can I establish TFS? From what I know that is VERY tough even in a big pond.

Also one thing yall can anser for me is when you stock tilapia what area in a pond do they hang out in?