Lake Management Jackson, Tennessee: Northern Companies and Pond Dye
If you needed a heart transplant and found a doctor that advertised himself as the best in your region for that surgery, hired him to do your surgery, then had to have the surgery aborted because he almost killed you from incompetence; and then you learned that he had killed several other people with the same surgery, and then you learned that he didn’t even live in your state, and had travelled there from two states away to take your money, would you be angry?
Having a good fishing pond is not life-and-death like heart surgery. But there are large companies that are based multiple states away and are advertising themselves as experts in managing private lakes and ponds in Tennessee, and they are no more competent than a heart surgeon who has killed multiple men and women on the operating table.
I make a lot of blog posts ranting and railing about this or that of my competitors. In a perfect world with no greed or deception or fraud or incompetence, every post I made would be roses and butterflies, and I would just tell you exactly how to have a great pond whether or not you ever utilized the services of my company. Unfortunately, there are greedy people in the world; there are dishonest people in the world; there are people who will tell you they’re the best in their field, when in reality they’re not even competent at a basic level and shouldn’t even be allowed to do work for you. There are such people in the lake and pond management world, and there are more than a couple companies that specifically work in the great state of Tennessee and are telling people they’re the best, or that they can provide competent service, when in fact they shouldn’t even be allowed to work in this state, such is the level of ignorance and incompetence that they bring to bear on landowners’ lakes and ponds. Sometimes I almost feel a little bad when I’m writing one of these posts; sometimes I wonder if perhaps I’m selling those companies short, if perhaps they might be doing a better job than I realize. Then I do a job like we did yesterday.
Our company was contacted about a month ago for a quote on providing weed control, pond dye, and feeder refilling services for a four-acre pond near Jackson. In speaking with the property manager, I learned that one of our competitors that comes here from two states north of us had previously managed the pond, though they had not been there since 2023. Initially, the property manager was just wanting a quote on those three services; I suggested that they have us do an electrofishing survey, on the chance that the previous company had not done a great job with the fish, so we could tell them what needed to be done to get the fishery headed in the right direction. So the property manager spoke with the landowner, and they hired us to do an electrofishing survey of the pond.
Understand: more than once, more than twice, we have worked on a lake or pond for a couple or a few years, only to then see the pond change hands, or the owner simply become preoccupied with other things for a couple or few years, and then later have a second opportunity to work on the pond. While it is absolutely true that when intensive management is ceased, the level of the fishery will decline, it generally will not lose all evidence of ever having been managed. There was a 1.6-acre pond near my hometown that I managed for ten years, from 1987 to 1997; I then moved to California for ten years; I began working with the pond for a second stint in 2009. When I started working with the pond in 1987, the bluegill in it averaged four inches long; they averaged nine inches in 1997. The average had dipped somewhat in 2009, but the bluegill still averaged seven inches. There was a six-acre pond about a mile from that one that I worked with from 1987 to 1997; when I started working with it, the bluegill averaged six inches; in 1997 they averaged nine inches. When I started a second stint with it in 2009, the bluegill averaged eight inches.
The other part of this equation is this: bad management, just like bad teaching or bad coaching or bad medicine, can be worse than none at all. We do assessments on lakes and ponds every year that have never had professional management and yet still have quality-sized bluegill or bass. So when I was contacted by this landowner in west Tennessee, I truly didn’t know what to expect. I hoped that the company who had done work prior to us had done a competent job, because that would make it easier for me to produce a desirable result for my new customer.
There is divergent opinion on the best path to a desirable pond, and then there is gross incompetence; what we found at this particular pond was several levels beyond the latter.
I already knew, from talking with the property manager, that the fishery was a bigger priority than weed control; I was concerned before I had ever seen the pond that the previous company had not managed the pond with this in mind, because the property manager mentioned that that other company had made monthly visits to the pond to treat it for algae. There are indeed landowners who care about nothing but having a pond that looks like a swimming pool, with not a shred of aquatic plant growth; fish are an afterthought, and they just want the pond to look nice. Just in talking a couple times with the property manager, it was clear that was not the mindset for this landowner; but I hoped that perhaps even though the other company had over-emphasized weed control, perhaps they had still done a servicable job with the fish.
Fish get bigger in bigger water bodies; a 2018 study on small impoundments in Georgia found that the single biggest factor in bluegill size was the size of the pond. A four-acre pond can grow bigger fish than a one- or two-acre pond; and we have grown ten-pound largemouth and bluegill to nearly three pounds in one-acre ponds. With even remotely competent management, that four-acre pond should have had at least some four- or five-pound bass and some nine-inch or bigger bluegill.
We captured 126 bluegill in an hour of electrofishing; we also captured 17 redear, 18 largemouth bass, one green sunfish, and eight black crappie. The bluegill were at a good ratio to the bass, if you go by government publications that still recommend ten bluegill for each bass; no knowledgeable private fisheries consultant in this country now goes by that ratio, because the science has advanced and higher numbers of bluegill are now stocked in trophy-bass ponds, and lower numbers in trophy-bluegill ponds. But just going by that ratio, the bluegill and bass were in balance. Some of our competitors will tell landowners that crappie can work in ponds; the more knowledgeable consultants discourage stocking crappie in lakes smaller than fifty acres; but just going by what some of the sales-first folk in this business will tell you, almost all of the fish we shocked up were fish that can thrive in a private pond. Green sunfish are recommended by no one; but we only found one of those, and they are known for getting into ponds without being stocked.
The biggest largemouth bass we shocked up measured fifteen inches long and weighed a whopping twenty-eight ounces. Out of those 126 bluegill that we captured, not a single one even measured six inches. The biggest crappie was a monstrous slab that came in at exactly six inches long.
It wasn’t a great mystery to me why the fish were so pitiful: I expected them to be bad just based on what the property manager had told me. Just from second-guessing myself in judging my worst competitors harshly, I had thought that perhaps we might find a few bluegill and bass that were at least decent, perhaps some eight-inch bluegill and maybe a three- or four-pound bass; we didn’t. And the fish we did find are completely and directly attributable to not just mild failure in management, but gross, inexcusable incompetence.
I have made multiple other blog posts about pond dye, and how anyone who recommends that product to the owner of a pond in Tennessee or Alabama or Georgia or Kentucky should be avoided at all costs because he has de facto declared himself wildly ignorant about southern lakes and ponds and how they should be managed. None of those blog posts can begin to describe what it’s like to actually confront a pond that has been managed for years by someone wielding that kind of northern-pond ignorance.
As I have noted in other posts, pond dye has a place on northern ponds due to the phenomenon of ice cover. If there is too much phytoplankton in a pond when it freezes over, and that pond then stays frozen for a few to several months, the phytoplankton will die from lack of sunlight, especially if snow is allowed to accumulate on the ice; if there is a good amount of phytoplankton, the decomposition of that plankton can remove enough oxygen from the water to cause a fish kill via oxygen depletion. Dyeing a pond kills phytoplankton by keeping the sunlight from reaching it; so dye properly utilized on a northern pond can prevent a fish kill.
Here in Tennessee, we don’t get ice for months at a time on our ponds and lakes, which is why you’ll never find a knowledgeable lake or pond consultant who actually is from this region who will recommend pond dye. Even those government publications that have outdated recommendations on fish ratios will tell you to do the exact opposite of using dye: they all recommend monthly fertilization for private lakes and ponds from spring through fall, because fertilization feeds phytoplankton rather than killing them.
And phytoplankton are the foundation of the food chain in any water body, whether you’re talking about a pond or lake or the open ocean; when there is no plankton, you’re not going to have great fish. This is why lake and pond management companies based in the South will always test the visibility of your water when they assess your lake or pond, because how far down they can see a bright white object tells them how much phytoplankton you have, which in turn reveals the strength or weakness of the natural food chain.
The pond we electrofished yesterday had 78” visibility. The recommended range is 18” to 24”. 78” of visibility equals pitiful fish.
The property manager’s initial quote request asked for a quote on monthly algae control, pond dye, and fish feeder refilling. The pond had not been worked on for two years when we got there, and we saw not one filament of algae anywhere on that pond. No aquatic herbicide or algaecide will stay effective for algae for more than about six weeks, max; this is why companies that offer recurring algae treatments do them monthly. I know it was one of the companies from up north that had previously worked on the pond because the property manager told me as much; that company had so thoroughly bombed that pond with pond dye and chemicals that two years after the last time they worked on it, there was still no trace of aquatic plant growth, and almost no trace of phytoplankton.
Phytoplankton is the foundation of the food chain in a lake or pond; aquatic plants are nature’s habitat for fish. If you denude a pond entirely of both, your fish are going to be some sad, small fish.
What’s it called when a company takes money from someone for an extended period of time to deliver a result very different from the result desired by the consumer, just to make money, all the while telling the consumer that this is actually what they need?
