Couldnt get this bass through the hole!

I set up the portable 6,000 gallon trout pond yesterday for the Elmwood All Outdoors Show this coming weekend, and then had about an hour of unaccounted for time left and decided to try to catch a trout to use as a guinea pig overnight. The reason I am up so early this morning is because we are headed up north to a trout hatchery to pick up a load of trout for stocking the pond for the show. This trout pond is going to be different than most, because you actually can take the trout home for dinner when you catch one! Also will have some tagged fish for prizes, etc.

Anyhow, I was out trying to catch a trout and all I could catch was bluegill, yellow perch, and this monster bass! Literally I could barely get it through the hole and was just praying it wouldnt break my line the whole time I was fighting it. This bass is just way too fat to be coming out of one of the hardest longest winters in our history! Many ponds and lakes have had terrible fish kills this winter and this gal is not merely surviving, she is thriving! She looks like an alabama deputy sherriff if you know what I mean?


Whenever I go ice fishing for bluegill I can catch tons of trout, but when I want to catch trout, it seems impossible??? Anyhow, I used some fatheads, bluegill and perch as guinea pigs in the trout pond overnight. They probably will die because the water is from the city hydrant and is full of chlorine that we are going to treat for later today, but hey you never know?

This week has been crazy busy! I love it, Brook and the kids not so much (I dont love missing that part). Life is a balancing act that just seems so hard to keep everything in perfect balance. Always so much to do and not enough time to get er all done. Anyhow, you have to check out this advertisement in this months Pond Boss magazine! It is for Outdoor Water Solutions, they manufacture windmill aeration systems and other lake and pond products to improve water quality. If you can believe this, over the last two years, HB Pond Management has been one of their top distributors in the nation and that is competing agains the likes of Farm King and other big chain stores!!!

Windmill Aeration Ad Featuring HB Pond Management

Sitting outside on a bucket in the dead of winter......

.....and just loving every minute of it! Ice fishing is just about my favorite activity in the whole world. First off, my body was just made just right for spending long days outside in the freezing arctic air. With my natural insulation and some really expensive arctic gear, I can spend mucho hours outside in temps well below zero degrees and not get cold a bit!

Sometimes we catch lots of fish, sometimes not so much; regardless, I still love being out in the middle of freezing knowwhere even if the fish arent bitin'. This has been my best ice fishing season to date and even though I still have 14" of ice on my lake, I fear that this just may have been my last ice fishing trip of the season. Busy schedule coming up, and I didnt book any fishing trips for this late in the season due to the fact that we normally dont have ice this late. This weekend I will be setting up an indoor trout fishing pond at the Elmwood All Outdoors show (come on out to the high school Sat and Sun) and then the weather is calling for rainy warmer temps over the next 10 days.

If indeed this is my farewell to ice fishing post, here are some highlights from this ice fishing season:

From Drop Box

From Nate's Fishing Blog

From Nate's Fishing Blog

From Nate's Fishing Blog

From Nate's Fishing Blog

From Nate's Fishing Blog

From Nate's Fishing Blog

From Nate's Fishing Blog

From Nate's Fishing Blog

From Nate's Fishing Blog

From Nate's Fishing Blog

From Nate's Fishing Blog

From Nate's Fishing Blog

From Nate's Fishing Blog

From Nate's Fishing Blog

From Nate's Fishing Blog

From Nate's Fishing Blog

From Nate's Fishing Blog

From Nate's Fishing Blog

From Nate's Fishing Blog

From Nate's Fishing Blog

From Nate's Fishing Blog

From Nate's Fishing Blog

From Nate's Fishing Blog

From Nate's Fishing Blog

Oh yeah, I got rolling cutting and pasting there for awhile and forgot all about todays fishing trip. My dad, Father in law, and I sneaked out to the lake about 4 pm and fished till dark.

Lee caught a nice bluegill, his biggest ever:


I found a nice little perch spot:




Dad hooked up with a nice rainbow:


Fish weren't jumping out of the hole, but we did get some real nice ones! If this was the end, it was a good trip to end the year on. Now I have to do real work for the next month or so until we start electrofishing about April.

Interesting and Large Bass Experiment

If I had a top ten list of favorite things, I would have a tuff choice in the middle of the pack choosing between Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and a new Fish stocking experiment! I just can't ever seem to get my fill of either.

Anyhow, enough of the nonsense as I try to make it through the rest of this yet another rainy day. This interesting pond that we electrofished for Pat Mcsherry last week was not necassarily meant to be a fish stocking experiment by design, but falls into that category by default. I have been researching and fooling around with different stocking combinations of low density predators with high density forage and Pat's pond just fit the bill perfectly.

Based on a foggy memory and some observations we estimated that the pond had a huge fish kill about 4 winters ago. The pond is very fertile and simply produced more fish biomass that summer than it could support through a harsh winter and the biggest fish simply suffocated to death. As the fish started dying, their decaying bodies only used up more and more of the available oxygen under the ice and pretty much all the fish died. Well to make a long story even a bit longer, all of the smallest fish in the pond found enough oxygen to survive the rest of the winter.

There were 1000's of small fish that survived the winter kill and absolutely no large predators to eat them. So many that the fish became instantly stunted, as they all competed for the same tiny peices of available food. That basically set the stage for a very low density predator/high density forage situation. When we electrofished this pond, it was completely full of tens of thousands of small crappie, tiny bluegill and little bullheads. The problem was they were all adult fish with huge eyes like this one.
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While there definitely was not a natural balanced fishery at hand, what we did find was just about what I told Pat to expect, I kept telling him that we were going to come across a handful of nice big bass as we were dialing up scores of adult midget fish. Small bass would survive the fish kill as well, and a few of them would make it big enough fast enough to avoid the huge stuntedization of the rest of the population. Then they simply would have as much to eat as they could ever desire! When we did start to find some bass, I didnt expect them to be quite like this: morbidly obese! Look at the size of their mouths in relationship to their bodies.

The average bass in this pond is 18.8 inches long with a relative weight average for the lake of 125%! The biggest bass we sampled was 20.5" and weighed 108 oz. with a 138% relative weight. A typical 20.5" LMB should weigh 78 oz.

You can actually learn quite a bit about LMB by observing this sort of scenario. I have electrofished and analyzed well more than 100 lakes and ponds across the midwest this year and can tell you this- If you want to truly grow big bass, you can do that much easier and faster by stocking just a few per acre and harvest them like crazy if they even think about making babies!

This may sound strange to many, but the average ADULT bass in Illinois is 12 inches long. If you wait until next year it will still be 12 inches long and if you let it grow up the year after that, its still going to be 12 inches! Many lakes and ponds will grow their original stocked fish well past 12 inches due to limited competition, and the first year class after that may hit 14-15 inches, but the large majority of their offspring will not grow much past 12 inches due to the increased and compounding competition, unless they are harvested, preyed upon, or naturally thinned down.

Huge Fat Bass and Bluegill

Today was probably the last electrofishing survey of the year! A cold front is moving in, along with yet another 1"+ rain, and that will just about put an end to electrofishing. We still have 4 aeration systems and 5 windmills to install, about 10,000 walleye a few hundred muskies and northerns, and that will pretty much wrap up our entire season until the lakes freeze up enough to start drilling holes!!!!

We shocked Oberhelmans lake and Pat's pond yesterday. Check out these pictures!

Then today we squeezed Jared Obrien's new pond in at the last minute. His new pond is completely full of 9-10 inch bluegill that are absolutely beautiful! Not too shabby for picking up a property with an exising pond! I expect great things from that pond over the next couple years!!

Week Review with Big Fish Pictures

This week has been tough, but were are still doing the best we can for all of our clients AND our family. Traveled east a couple hours for an electrofishing survey on Monday. Headed north of Chicago for an electrofishing survey Tuesday. Went to kickapoo wednesday and shocked a pond for a new client with an absolutely beautiful pond and property. Thursday we started a marathon of fish deliveries!

The lake we electro shocked on Tuesday is 147 acres and absolutely gorgeous. For some reason the owners dont want their name or location mentioned, and I cant imagine why perhaps one of the best fishing lakes in the state located near a heavily populated windy city wouldnt want people to know their name and location? Anyhow check out these pics, they will tell the tale of the lake:

Here are some pics from the 2 acre pond we electrofished on wednesday:

So back to thursday! We met the fish truck about 8:30 pm over near champaign and delivered 2000 nice channel catfish in the steady rain. Then Justin headed north with a load of feed trained bass, golden shiners, and fathead minnows. I jumped in with the fish guy and we headed west towards Norris, and we delivered quite a few feed trained bass and large hybrid bluegill along the way. About 5:30 am and we get all done delivering fish and head to sleep at the lake. I had to get up at 7:30 am to head into town for the funeral and was back delivering fish by about 1 pm. On my way to the last stop and I ran out of gas just 3 miles away! My client came up the hill with some gas and we were back on the road to finish up our fish delivery marathon!! I fell asleep on my parents couch about 6:30 pm and woke up at my house at 7 am??? Apparently Brook came over and got me, I just dont know how they lugged me into the car and into bed?

Saturday my dad and mom came with me to check the trapnets at a pond, take care of chores out at the lake, and then deliver a load of rainbow trout out to Otter Creek Preserve. Then saturday evening I cooked some dinner with Mae and Noah and we just hung out at home riding bikes and raking leaves. The week was so hectic, that the kids just needed some dad time, and that was just what the doctor ordered for me as well!