I really love the information I'm getting right now from this thread. Unfortunately I'm only able to speculate how the lake was managed previously. Even my own data up until last year was all anecdotal, though I'm sure you can hardly call anything I'm doing now scientific. After a few weeks without rain in the midsummer, the lake is very clear, I get 15 feet on a secchi disk.
The previous owners was made up of a group of families. If I were to guess I'd say they kept and ate a lot of fish.
One thing that has changed has been the explosion of weed growth on the north end of the lake. There is a large bay of about 15 acres that gets about 60 percent weeded out by mid summer. Weeds all the way to the top that will often find themselves wrapped around our boat prop. We've theorized everything from agricultural run off to the 200+ canada geese that roost on the lake every evening by late summer.
The idea of LMB that are more adept at avoiding angling is something I could definitely see. Fork to my nose I would say I believe there is at least one 7lb largemouth cruising that lake, my girlfriend hooked into a big one last summer that we lost at the boat that I think would've pushed 7. Of course I have guests all the time that swear up and down there's double digits swimming around, I take those reports with a grain of salt.
Fertilization is something I've read about but really haven't considered much, because like I pointed out above we believed ag runoff was already doing that. One thing that I'm reading now which has intrigued me is fertilization leading to an algae bloom that could potentially suppress our weed issue on our north side, or is there a potential that that issue gets exacerbated? Also one thing I didn't add is that the lake does have an inlet and outlet, 2 inlets actually and one outlet, all small streams. The large weed bloom is in the bay where the main inlet comes in.
I will update with pictures as I can take them, I wasn't around the lake this weekend so I'll see if i can pull some from the archives and update them this coming weekend
