Howdy, Friends and Neighbors,
I just found out about this forum and can't wait to glean a few pearls of wisdom from you wise folk.
To start with I live in NW Georgia and grew up fishing in ponds and cricks. To me there is no source of peace and solitude that can be found any where that matches what one finds around small ponds. No yahoos on skis, towed or self propelled, and no "Hats turned back 90 m.p.h every where they go so called PRO's". Never could figg'r out how to catch a fish moving that fast. The closest lake to me was / is Alatoona, and as far as I knew then, was where we went IF we wanted to just ride around in a boat all week end. Back then it was called "The Dead Sea", if that tells ya'll what the fish'n was like. Some say that it's better now, but you still can't grind me up, mix me with beer, and pour me on fishing a place like that. So needless to say I love me some pond fish'n.
The main pond that I grew up on was our family pond and is 2.5 acres and from 2'-8' deep, run off fed and built in the early 50's. It had all of your basic fun for a kid to catch fish, bream, small LM bass, channel cats, and brown bull heads. From 1983 till a few years ago I did some traveling, working for "Our Uncle", and didn't get in much fis'n at all. When I returned home for good all I could think of sit'n on the side of that pond sip'n some thing cool, and drowing some bait. But, during my absence absolutely no one did any thing but cut the grass around it. The bream were in the three finger range, and you could catch the 10"-12" bass by the bucketful on chicken liver. And all of the cats, and bull heads were gone, nada, non existent.
Luckily for all concerned a friend of mine down the street had just dug out and fixed his Grand Pa's old pond so that his Grand Kids could have a little place to learn to fish. He had no fish and I had too many as far as bream and bass were concerned. I've spent the last two years "transfering" the small ones that I caught into his pond and a few larger ones from other sources and blood lines into mine. The transformation has been tremendous! I've got hand size and up bream, 1/2-1 lb. shellcrackers, some nice red bellys and the bass are growing and have even started bedding again. I've been able to put a few channel cats in from 10" to several pounds. And I added 10 lbs. of fathead minnows for forage.
My big problem, that I hope ya'll can help with. is that I can't find any brown bull heads around here any where. When I was a kid, if you had a mud hole that held water for more than two weeks you had "specks" in it. They have vertually disapeared around here with no explanation that I can find. Now I know that in other parts of this country, they are trash fish good for nothing but stealing bait. But some of my best memories as a child was the fact that no matter you're age or fishability, with just about any bait, you could have a ball with them, and they taste pretty good too. I've only found one hatchery, in Arkansas that will even admit to handling them, and they don't have a truck that comes any where close to Ga. Any help or suggestions will be greatly appreciated.
I'm very glad that I found Ya'll, tight lines,
Taz
