Your answer is not in adding more forage fish!! For growing larger bass you need to be removing bass not adding more forage fish.
The 'general' rule for how many bass to remove per acre when large bass are the goal and bass smaller than 14" are predominate, is to start by removing at least 15 lbs to 20lbs of bass per acre for all bass less than 14"-15". KEEP GOOD RECORDS. So you have your work 'cut out' for you this year. 150-200 lbs of LMB is a lot of bass. Who said larger ponds are easy to manage??
Expert advice is then if you find it easy to near the end to take out 150-200 lbs/10 acres it is probably not enough. The you need to work toward 25-30 lbs per acre. AT this point you should start to see the average size of bass caught is getting larger.
Once you start seeing larger bass in the catch, you need to maintain the effort to annually be removing bass less than 12" to amount to at least 10 lbs/acre. You know you are removing enough bass when the largest bass of this year get larger the next year (Catch records verify this). When largest size bass your are seeing limits out at any weight less than 9-10 lbs you are not harvesting enough bass each year.
Selectively removing male bass can be helpful but this is difficult during most of the year. Male bass do not get as big as the females - protect them when you can to have more bigger faster growing potential. You can tell females easily for about three months, look for red swollen urogential opening. You may not get it 100% correct but try to target males vs females during the spring spawn.
Last edited by Bill Cody; 01/23/17 08:04 PM.
