Williiamson County Lake Management: The Importance of Integrity Part 3

If you own a private lake or pond in Williamson County, you own some of the most valuable water anywhere; you don’t need anyone to tell you that your land is more valuable than land in most counties in this state or anywhere in the country; but that lake or pond makes it that much more valuable. So you deserve to have it managed right. But how do you make sure you choose the best company to manage it when there are so many claiming to be the best? I would argue that this is not as complicated as it seems: look at two criteria, and you’ll have enough information to make the best choice. What are those criteria? Integrity and results.

Integrity may seem hard to quantify at first glance. But if you simply go by what the company is telling you from their website, you can glean a lot. One of our competitors that is based out of a state two states north of here is stocking fish in Tennessee ponds, including yours if you hire them, that are coming from their hatchery two states north of here, a hatchery that’s in a completely different climate than what we have; they’re bringing you northern bluegill and northern largemouth bass, species which none of the leading companies that are actually headquartered in a southern state would bring you because multiple studies have found that Florida species of bass and bluegill grow faster and get bigger in southern climates than the northern species. TWRA has been stocking Florida bass in Lake Chickamauga since 2000, and in 2015 a new state record largemouth bass was caught from that lake; their Florida bass stocking program has been so successful that they have expanded it to several other lakes across the state. They have also begun stocking coppernose bluegill into multiple lakes in this state, because they get bigger in our waters than northern bluegill do. That northern lake management company that wants to manage your valuable lake isn’t telling you about where their fish are coming from; they won’t mention it unless you ask, because they don’t want you to think about that detail, because it might cause you to question their motives. If you ask them to bring you coppernose bluegill or Florida bass instead of fish from their facility hundreds of miles north, they’re going to forget to return your phone call because you’re hurting their profit margin. If that margin is more important to them than what will give you the best possible fishery, the biggest fish for your family and friends to catch, what does that say about their integrity?

That same northern lake management company claims to be the premiere company in this space; that’s easy for anyone to say, but what does it mean? I think it’s safe to say that a majority of lake and pond owners want quality fishing in their water, and specifically, fishing that’s a cut above what is typically available in the average public lake; after all, isn’t that the whole point of owning your own water, and spending money on it to improve it? We certainly get several calls every year from landowners who have a new pond, and aren’t looking to hire us to manage it long-term but just want it stocked at a basic, inexpensive level so that their family can catch a fish or two now and then. But no one hires a professional lake management company to manage their lake on an ongoing basis just trying to have average fishing. If you’re looking to hire someone to manage your lake, and specifically because you want great fishing, then you probably want to hire the very best, most knowledgeable biologist you can find. If you find yourself in a situation where you have to go to court, do you want the best lawyer you can get or just the cheapest, or the first one to return your call? Do you want the one with the best personality or the one who has the best track record of winning in court? If you had to have open-heart surgery, would you hire the surgeon who told the funniest jokes or the one who had saved the most lives?

All you have to do to know who knows more about fish between our company and the one referenced above that claims to be the best, is to look at their own website and the pictures of what they consider to be noteworthy fish catches, and then look at our website and our fish photos. If I didn’t have any bigger fish to show off than what they have on their site, I would never have started this business.

Integrity and results typically go hand-in-hand. One of our competitors that actually is based in a nearby southern state regularly stocks trophy-sized largemouth bass, bass that are up to ten pounds the day they’re stocked, in their customers’ ponds. This makes perfect sense in theory: why wait to have a world-class pond if you have the money to get it there immediately, without having to grow the fish to that size? The only problem with this approach is that it’s based on building the bank account of the management company rather than an actual functioning, high-level fishery. When a private lake or pond is stocked from scratch specifically for trophy bass, multiple forage species are stocked several months prior to stocking the bass, specifically so they have time to spawn and build up their numbers to a level they could never reach if predators were present the moment they were stocked (it’s a lot easier to get your family started, if you’re a spawning bluegill, if you don’t have to worry about getting eaten by a bass while you’re trying to fan out a nest). Every management company that’s even halfway competent does this, even the less-than-completely-honest ones. So by the time the bass are stocked, there could be hundreds of thousands of tiny baitfish swimming around in the lake, the perfect size for the bass to eat. Largemouth bass have been recorded to grow up to four pounds within the first year of stocking at two to three inches long when stocked into lakes and ponds with this approach. Bass that are stocked into this type of carefully-created environment can grow to ten pounds in four or five years, in Tennessee; largemouth have been grown to ten pounds even faster than that in states like Texas and Florida that have virtually a year-round growing season. But to give you an example specific to this state, in early July 2018 our company stocked 80 pure Florida bass in the one- to two-pound range into a four-acre pond in northern middle Tennessee, a pond less than an hour from the Kentucky border. The pond had been stocked a year earlier with four different species of forage, and automatic feeders had been feeding those forage fish for a year. The first week of September 2022, this bass was caught from that four-acre pond:

That’s a nine-pound bass. The bass we stocked originally came from a famed hatchery in Texas renowned for its Florida bass genetics; those fish were likely yearlings; so that nine-pounder was probably just under five years old.

Lest you think that bass was an isolated event, or luck:

All of the bass above were actually caught months earlier than the nine-pounder, in March and April of 2022. Florida bass have an average lifespan of twelve to seventeen years, which means that pond will eventually have numbers of bass from ten to fifteen pounds or bigger.

The flip side of that is what happens when you buy a bass that size from a hatchery. There may be a hatchery somewhere in the South that has devoted a pond or ponds to growing out largemouth to advanced sizes as fast as possible; if there is, we have never encountered it. There’s a reason: the disparity between stocking numbers for a trophy-bass pond and a hatchery pond isn’t small, it’s dramatic. The average stocking rate that most companies use for the bass in a trophy-bass pond they’re stocking for a customer is 35 to 50 bass per acre. Any fish farm that raises largemouth is going to be putting thousands of bass, or tens of thousands, per acre into any pond they grow bass in, because that’s the only way they can make a profit. On an even more basic level, if they only tried to grow out 1,000 bass per year to trophy sizes and they were stocking 50 bass per acre, they would have to have 20 acres of water devoted just to growing out those 1,000 bass. No hatchery in this country is doing that because they would go broke; and most don’t have the space.

Bass that are grown to advanced sizes at hatcheries are almost without exception done with pellet feeding. There’s nothing wrong with feed-trained bass; but bass fed only pellets are going to be eight or ten inches long after one year, not even weighing half a pound; by the time they get to eight or ten pounds, they’re going to be ten or more years old, approaching the end of their lifespan.

That ten-pound bass may get you excited when it’s being stocked into your pond, especially if it’s accompanied by several other bass in the seven- to ten-pound range. Would you still be excited if you knew all of those bass would be gone a year from now, dead of old age? What if you knew that you’d never hook any of them because the female-only approach makes them impossible to catch, so they were just swimming and eating in your pond for a few months and you never got to catch them, though you spent many thousands of dollars to buy them, and then they died?

This is not conjecture on my part: a high-profile Williamson county resident had one of his people call me a year or so ago, wanting to buy trophy-sized female Florida bass. As I asked questions about the pond, I discovered that they had recently had the pond electrofished by our competitor that had sold them all those trophy bass, and somehow, most of those big bass that they had just stocked a year earlier had somehow disappeared.

Beware con-artist lake managers that are better at talking than they are fisheries science. They’ll take your money as long as you let them. Or you could call us, and have a lake like what you see in the pictures in this post. All of the bass in these pictures were caught on lures, not live bait, by amateur fishermen just fishing for a couple hours here and there. And this pond has not reached its ceiling, not even close.