For our pong management experts: Episode 9 of our video series with Bassmaster to turn Lake Y into a bass fishing paradise entered some choppy waters, indeed flood waters, and includes how they and other natural catastrophic occurrences can affect your pond or lake.
The Lake Y project aims to educate anglers and pond-owners on how to identify opportunities to improve small lakes, and steps to take to turn an average lake into bass fishing bliss.
Bassmaster editor James Hall in this episode talked about what appeared to be a 10-year flood that affected the lake. The dock he stands on had been about a foot underwater, he said, and the spillway had 3-4 feet of water going over it.
John Jones, president of Lochow Ranch, said the flooding was bad enough that it created currents that could have swept forage fish downstream. Lake Y is on a large watershed, John has said previously, and he could see a change in its water quality.
Flooding can have a lot of impacts, John said. “The first is you’re flushing the lake with new water, maybe water you want, maybe water you don’t want.”
Flooding can bring undesirable quantities of nutrients, and cause things like harmful algae blooms. “A small flood generally speaking is not going to cause too many problems for fish,” he said. “Most game fish species swim upstream. The smaller fish, the blue gill and bass, when they’re tiny, generally will go with the current, but most of the fish go upstream.
“When you get big currents in the flood like you’re talking about, you can lose a lot of your bigger sport fish. It can be heartbreaking. Maybe good for your neighbor, but not good for you.”
Managing Mother Nature isn’t easy, he said. “I would say if you’re going to grow big fish, you want to have no catastrophes, no accidents, you want to do boring things for 10 years, but Mother Nature pretty much without fail will make sure that doesn’t happen.”
James noted that Lake Y has also suffered the opposite of flooding: 45-50 days of no water, no rain whatsoever. The water dropped to the lowest point he’s seen, “probably three feet lower than we’re seeing there right now,” he said.
John explained that in some ways drought can be beneficial. “A seasonal drought can concentrate the bait fish, pull them away from the structure, and expose them to predation. You can get some really fat bass,” he said.
But probably the biggest problem with a minor drought is it will cause weed growth and lead to a devastating fish kill, he added, especially in the summer.
James also mentioned natural predators, such as cormorants, pelicans and otters – all of which can have a big impact on fish numbers.
John said cormorants can mainly hit your bait fish and on average eat about two pounds of bait per bird per day, so put a retail value of 25 bucks a pound on your bait and that’s $50 a bird a day.
Pelicans, he said, also eat bait and medium-sized bass but are generally a problem in bigger lakes. “We don’t see them as often in smaller lakes. Of course, you know both birds are protected so there’s not a whole lot you can do about them,” he said. But lake owners can do non-lethal things to deter them from the area.
As for otters, John said they’re a sign of a healthy ecosystem, but they can also put a big hurt on your fish population. An otter will eat about 7 pounds of fish per day and can kill up to 28 pounds of fish per day, he said, which he’s seen destroy bass fisheries. Though otters are nocturnal, he said there are several signs that out them as culprits
“It’s important to understand what can happen so you can kind of prepare and take action and do things that might prevent some of these catastrophes from happening,” James said.
John answered, “Absolutely. You can stave off most of those. You can stave off a turnover by having an aeration system. You could stave off a blue-green algae kill by doing proper treatments. You can work on the predators. You’re never going to eliminate Mother Nature, but you can mitigate the impacts of those type of things.
“Floods, not so much. If you try to keep your fish in with fences and things, you could end up hurting your dam and you certainly don’t want to do that. A drought, you know you can pump supplemental water. So there are ways to mitigate every one of these, but generally you want to identify it as it’s happening and not wait till your point of no return and then try to fix it. That rarely works.”
Follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter to see the progress in the Lake Y project in coming month.
Why Choose Lochow Ranch for Pond & Lake Management
Serving Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana, Lochow Ranch Pond & Lake Management proudly puts more than two decades of experience to work for you. Our team includes biologists, technicians and other professionals with deep expertise in pond and lake management services.
Our partnership with Bassmaster to turn Lake Y into a bass fishing paradise enters its third year in the latest episode. Learn how an electrofishing survey can detail fish populations and density.
Bassmaster editor James Hall says it’s about 12 months since a truck full of coppernose bluegill were added into the underperforming Alabama lake and since then, it has gone through some significant flooding.
John Jones, president of Lochow Ranch, leads Hall through some good, some medium, and some bad (but recoverable) news. The flooding was bad enough that it created currents that could have swept the bluegill forage fish downstream, he says.
But only an electrofishing survey would provide a clear snapshot of what was happening, he adds. The last such survey had been performed about a year prior.
The Lake Y project aims to educate anglers on how to identify opportunities to improve small lakes, and steps to take to turn an average lake into bass fishing bliss. So far in the series, John and James have explored topography, water source, water quality and clarity, area predators such as otters, vegetation, fertilization, pellet feeding, and electroshocking to understand the state of the 56-acre creek-fed lake.
Lake Y is on a large watershed, John says, and he could see a change in its water quality from the flooding, making it less desirable. “You can see the creek influences on the lake,” he says.
The electrofishing survey shows bait and bass numbers are up. As he measures and weighs the fish, Lochow Ranch Fisheries Biologist Brandon Booth says it’s important to keep predator and forage numbers at proper levels so bass growth isn’t stunted.
But many of the fish have red sores, which John explains is common with flooding.
It’s “something we see a lot of especially in the spring or the fall, during years we’ve had a big influx of water,” he says. “We’ll see bacteria counts, they’ll get a little bit higher, and you may have fish that get a little bit stressed and they’re susceptible to getting infections.”
The fish will recover, he adds.
“So that’s good news. So if you all see fish like this, they have the crazy sores on your lakes, know that all is not lost. Thankfully these fish are going to survive,” James says.
The electrofishing survey also reveals less desirable fish for Lake Y, such as sucker fish and channel catfish. Because the lake is shallow, they will stir up the silt, making spawning harder and managing the pond a lot tougher.
So, good news on the bass; great news on the bait, John says. “That’s the foundation. If you want fat cows, you need lots of green grass.”
The previously added structure piles “worked like a charm and so we got big fish.” More structure piles would be beneficial, he said, but because Lake Y is shallow, some owners might not like to be able to see them.
The medium news, he says, “You still have lots of non-game species there. I think that’s life on the creek.”
As for the biggest challenge moving forward: “That’s pretty straightforward, it’s gonna be the actual construction of the lake. So this lake is a shallow lake. If we improve the water quality we’re gonna grow a lot of weeds, which is gonna be undesirable for some of the people out here,” John says.
“Just getting around how this lake was constructed to begin with is our biggest single challenge,” John says. “We’re already making progress on the bait. We’re making progress on the bass. We’re going to make progress on the genetics. But we are still dealt the hand that we’re dealt here.”
“I’m excited about the progress for Lake Y,” James adds.
Follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter to see the progress in the Lake Y project in coming month.
Why Choose Lochow Ranch for Pond & Lake Management
Serving Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana, Lochow Ranch Pond & Lake Management proudly puts more than two decades of experience to work for you. Our team includes biologists, technicians and other professionals with deep expertise in pond and lake management services.
Automatic fish feeders are a common sight at many private lakes and ponds. But if your goal is to grow trophy bass, is your feeding strategy tuned to maximize growth?
That was one of the points our president, John Jones, made in his recent interview with Bassmaster Radio.
Host Thom Abraham asked John about his advice for feeding options for pond and lake owners who are looking to maximize growth of gamefish and panfish.
“First off, of course, in the well-balanced pond or lake, you do not need to stock fish repetitively,” John said.
“There’s an amount of growth that a body of water can sustain that’s based on water quality inputs, fertilizer, generally the health of the water, because that’s the base of the food chain,” he said.
In the interview, Thom and John discussed a range of lake management and fishery management tips, stemming from our work with Bassmaster on the Lake Y Project. They explored a topic that many people ask about, automatic fish feeders and other steps to spur fish growth.
John explained that supplemental feeding is sometimes accompanied by pond or lake fertilization, which can nourish the whole lake food chain. “If you want to supplement what that natural process will grow – and a lot of times in a private lake, that’s somewhere between 40 and 300 pounds of total fish per acre – you can move to fertilization, which can raise the total poundage of fish 500 or maybe even 1,000 pounds per acre. But really, probably 500 would be a max with a really heavy fertilization program.”
He continued, “But a safer way to do that is to use a pelleted fish food. Pelleted fish food is how commercial farms grow fish. It’s the cheapest way to grow fish safely.
“And generally speaking, depending on the quality of the feed, if you use a good quality feed you’re going to grow about a pound of bait fish for every 2 pounds of feed.”
John said a lot of people feed their fish with automatic fish feeders but use low-quality feed that is less expensive. It’s a case of you get what you pay for, and he recommended buying the best quality feed you can afford.
“And just know that if you buy the highest quality feed, for every 50-pound bag of fish food you put in, you grew 25 pounds of bait. You can skip that step and move directly to stocking bait. But buying bait, you’re cheating time and it costs a lot more money.”
John concluded, “It roughly takes about 10 pounds of bait to grow 1 pound of bass. So you could see, it could add up pretty quickly. I recommend people to stick with a good pelleted feeding program if they want to supplement the natural processes.”
Along with supplying automatic fish feeders and feed, Lochow Ranch can provide feeding guidance to maximize the productivity of your fishery.
We teamed with Bassmaster to take an anonymous 56-acre lake in Alabama and turn it into a thriving bass fishery.
Follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter to see the progress in the Lake Y project in coming months.
Why Choose Lochow Ranch for Pond & Lake Management
Serving Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana, Lochow Ranch Pond & Lake Management proudly puts more than two decades of experience to work for you. Our team includes biologists, technicians and other professionals with deep expertise in pond and lake management services.
Follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter to see the progress in the Lake Y project in coming months and learn more about fishery mangement.
Why Choose Lochow Ranch for Pond & Lake Management
Serving Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana, Lochow Ranch Pond & Lake Management proudly puts more than two decades of experience to work for you. Our team includes biologists, technicians and other professionals with deep expertise in pond and lake management services.
And each step of the fishery management process is important for turning Lake Y into a bass fishing paradise.
That’s how we found ourselves in Alabama last fall conducting the second electrofishing survey of Lake Y.
We have teamed with Bassmaster for The Lake Y Project, as we look to turn an underperforming 56-acre lake in Alabama into a thriving fishery.
Now in year 2 of the project, we are running through the steps of the process for effective fishery management, including understanding the lake’s current conditions, creating a plan to improve it, and then executing on that plan.
The first electrofishing survey of Lake Y last spring showed there were a number of undesirable fish species in the lake, John explained to James. The next step in the management plan and process is to conduct a second survey and take action to remove some of those fish.
The nature of Lake Y, with its water inflows and outflows, means these undesirable species will not be able to be eliminated entirely, John said, but at least they can be managed. That will give bass and forage fish the chance to thrive.
Electrofishing in action
If you have ever wondered about electrofishing and how it works, the latest Lake Y video provides a great overview of the technique.
Electrofishing is considered by fishery biologists to be the best approach to inventorying the fish population of a lake.
An electric current pushed into the water by a specially-designed boat briefly stuns the fish. The fish are collected and weighed and measured for recording by our fishery biologists, then returned unharmed to the water.
“We get to see the fish, how they’re doing, weigh them, measure them, check on their body condition, really get a sense of how and where a lake is in its development process,” explained Matt Ward, one of our fisheries biologists, in the video.
Matt showed multiple examples of undesirable species of fish that the second survey found in Lake Y. These fish can end up competing with the fish you do want in the lake, such as bass and the forage fish that they feed on.
Often these fish can be removed during an electrofishing survey. Or, as in the case of Lake Y, trotlines can also be run to catch and collect the undesirable species to remove them from the lake.
Lake Y project proceeds: pond stocking & feed
In addition to the population surveys, we conducted pond stocking at Lake Y, introducing coppernose bluegill to provide forage for bass and boost growth.
Why Choose Lochow Ranch for Pond & Lake Management
Serving Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana, Lochow Ranch Pond & Lake Management proudly puts more than two decades of experience to work for you. Our team includes biologists, technicians and other professionals with deep expertise in pond and lake management services.
Our project with Bassmaster reached a very important milestone in the latest installment of the video series: the addition of structure to Lake Y.
Structure refers to the underwater features that give bait fish and young bass shelter and larger bass a place to feed.
For Lake Y, adding structure to make a fish friendly habitat will be one of the most important steps in creating a prime bass fishery, according to Lochow Ranch President John Jones.
We have teamed with Bassmaster for The Lake Y Project, focusing on turning an underperforming 56-acre lake in Alabama into a thriving fishery.
In Episode 4, John and James Hall, editor-in-chief of Bassmaster Magazine, dive into the importance and types of structures that can be added to lakes as part of fishery management.
“What we like to see in a lake is somewhere around 20 percent structure,” John explains. That much underwater structure helps the bait and game fish population to grow while still affording good fishing.
John and James survey the different types of structure that are commonly used.
A popular form of lake structure is old Christmas trees. A tree can be weighted at the base with cinderblocks so that it can float upright and fish can shelter among the branches.
The positives of Christmas trees are that they are an inexpensive approach and can be easy to find if you ask neighbors to let you take their trees after the holiday season.
But there are several drawbacks, John says. Christmas trees disintegrate in a few months in a lake and no longer offer adequate structure. They also can snag lures, and getting a hook unsnarled from an underwater Christmas tree is very hard.
That said, Christmas tree can work very well as fish-friendly cover while they last, John says. One pond survey the Lochow team conducted found 150 bass at a single Christmas tree.
Another structure option is to sink bundles of brush including pieces of hardwood. This can be much longer lasting than Christmas trees, John says, explaining that he has seen hardwood structure that was still effective 15 years after it was placed.
When putting in brush as structure, John says, it is best to use bundles and to place the bundles in roughly the size and shape of a semi trailer.
You want brush structure placement to be long but narrow so that the fish have cover but also so that you can get access to where the fish are for good fishing.
The final type of habitat elements that John and James discuss is the manmade structure. Naturally these are very long-lasting and provide excellent cover for fish. They don’t create as many headaches with snagging lures as sunken trees do, and it is relatively easier to extract a caught hook from an artificial structure.
For Lake Y in particular, the addition of structure is key to improving the lake’s performance as a fishery.
In fact, fish were spotted around the Christmas trees shortly after they were installed in Lake Y. “To say that this lake was dying for some structure, these fish were needing some structure, may have been an understatement,” James says.
Adding structure to an underperforming pond is a very important step in fishery management, John says, but you need to make sure you have your goals in mind and realize it can take time and patience for a fishery to reach its prime.
“You want to put forth your goals and you want to make them attainable,” John advises. “So it’s not reasonable to assume we can get everything done overnight. Taking something like a lake with almost no structure and getting it to 10 to 20 percent is going to take several years.
“But once you’ve got a good plan, and you’re efficient and you stay targeted with what you’re doing, you’re going to get there.”
Why Choose Lochow Ranch for Pond & Lake Management
Serving Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana, Lochow Ranch Pond & Lake Management proudly puts more than two decades of experience to work for you. Our team includes biologists, technicians and other professionals with deep expertise in pond and lake management services.
The third installment of our video venture “The Lake Y Project” with Bassmaster is short but important and focuses on water clarity and vegetation management.
Lochow Ranch president John Jones is quick to tell James Hall, editor-in-chief of Bassmaster Magazine, that all water’s not created equal as the two continue their conversation about how to transform an average lake into a fishing paradise. You can see Episode 3 here.
“We try to use water clarity to our advantage,” John says. “The perfect bass lake would have somewhere around 18 to 24 inches of visibility. The water would be a dark green color, nothing floating on top of the water. That would produce a lot of phytoplankton, grow a lot of baby fish and, importantly, shade out submerged weeds after a certain depth. We like to reduce light penetration.”
Lake Y, an anonymous 56-acre creek-fed lake in Alabama, has suboptimal water clarity, John says. “Certainly, it’s not horrible,” he explains. “We’ve had many, many lakes with 1 inch or less of visibility. Those lakes are generally very unproductive.”
For really “choked” lakes, you’ll find three main categories of pond weeds, he says: emergent plants such as cattails; submerged plants such as hydrilla; and floating plants such as the white water lily.
When designing a new lake, John likes to plan for 20-30 percent vegetation coverage. “That’s not always possible,” he says.
As he examined Lake Y, John says, “This is a very common plant community for a lake that’s got probably, honestly too many grass carp in it.”
Adding grass carp are an inexpensive route that lake owners often take to reduce submerged pond weeds, he says. “I like to say using grass carp to control your lake is like using goats to mow your yard,” he says. There are pros and cons.
Used correctly, they’re an affordable way to reduce submerged pond weeds at a tiny fraction of the cost of herbicides, and are a great tool with proper fencing and management. But unmanaged they will almost always cause a crash in your bait fish and bass conditions in the longer term.
John identified mainly woody, dense-type species of pond weeds that grass carp don’t like such as water willow and milfoil. He also pointed out emergent cattails in the dam area that could attract beaver dens and secretly damage the dam.
John says he’d add a couple of plant species that are easy to fish, not too invasive, would thrive and be easy and inexpensive to treat, as well as being preferred by grass carp. He says using EPA-approved herbicides or algaecides around the dock areas – which are almost always too dense – is optimal for anglers of all skill levels.
As lake owners keep a close eye on weeds, they also need to be aware of harmful or invasive species, he adds. States are already responding to problems that private owners aren’t seeing yet, but most likely will.
John started his assessment of Lake Y in the first episode with a walkabout, identifying overall problems and opportunities, then followed in the second episode with an electrofishing survey to reveal the lake’s fish population.
Why Choose Lochow Ranch for Pond & Lake Management
Serving Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana, Lochow Ranch Pond & Lake Management proudly puts more than two decades of experience to work for you. Our team includes biologists, technicians and other professionals with deep expertise in pond and lake management services.
Lochow Ranch president John Jones chats with James Hall, editor-in-chief of Bassmaster Magazine, to discuss the species, sizes and weights of fish found during the survey.
Electrofishing briefly shocks and paralyzes fish and allows for a lake management inventory of the population to be created.
John first studied Lake Y with a walkabout, identifying problems and opportunities. John advised Lake Y owners start an improvement strategy with satellite photos identifying other water body influences and an examination of the lake’s history: when it was built, watershed influences and management approaches. He identified Lake Y as being off color and in a shallow ravine with a small dam.
His visual assessment also included evidence of otters, and identified issues surrounding the lake’s number and condition of boats, fish feeders and spillway.
Bassmaster says Lake Y “could well represent the majority of small lakes and ponds scattered throughout the country.” And, indeed, that’s exactly what John found after analyzing the data his team collected during the electrofishing survey.
“Really, this is a very average lake,” John said, “which is a great starting point. This is what people are dealing with all over America. You’re overpopulated with small stunted bass, not horrifically so but certainly so. You have all the right species in the lake. In addition, you have some species that, we’ll call them undesirable, stuff that’s not really adding to production.
“I feel like we got great data today,” he added.
There are lots of variations of electrofishing boats, John explained, but Lochow Ranch “basically builds ours in-house.” A generator using between 10-50 amps pushes about 10,000 volts through cables attached to the boat. The current puts fish in a state of temporary paralysis and allows for easy collection and analysis.
One survey will produce a dataset of about 3-5% of the lake. Lochow’s teams use it daily both for exploring new populations as well as for managing existing populations. Multiple electrofishing surveys over time will allow for an even more complete picture.
It’s an excellent tool for correcting an out-of-balance pond. Stunted fish or unwanted species can be easily and quickly removed as part of the service. And the survey acts as the reference point for a long-term pond management plan and provides clues for corrective stocking and harvest recommendations.
While on the boat, Lee Schoech, one of our fisheries biologists, identified several species, including largemouth bass; freshwater drum (which indicated the creek is substantial); channel catfish; carp; threadfin shad and gizzard shad; bluegill; crappie; redear sunfish; longnose gar and spotted gar among them.
Lee rubbed swabs on the tongues of the fish to get their genetic profile and establish a baseline for the fishery.
Asked about his gut feeling on Lake Y, John says, “I’m going to enjoy this project. … I believe this lake is going to take just some very traditional improvements. It’s going to do a heavy feeding program, a quality stocking program. We’re going to look at the genetics on the fish.”
But in the next episode, Lochow and Bassmaster are going to focus on ways to add structures and cover to the lake and create much-needed habitats to increase productivity. The structures also create areas where fishermen know they can find fish.
Capping off the episode, James asked John about some of the craziest things John has shocked up in his career of electrofishing surveys.
The largest largemouth bass he’s personally shocked was 19.1 pounds, John replied, as well as a lot of fish in the 15-16-pound category. He’s pulled alligator gar he believes were well over the state record; blue and yellow cats approaching triple digits; and goldfish over 10 pounds.
Aquarium fish such piranha are always a surprise, but the cormorants, alligators and the 60-70-pound beaver were also very memorable, he said laughing.
Why Choose Lochow Ranch for Pond & Lake Management
Serving Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana, Lochow Ranch Pond & Lake Management proudly puts more than two decades of experience to work for you. Our team includes biologists, technicians and other professionals with deep expertise in pond and lake management services.
The series examines how we tackle Lake Y, an anonymous 56-acre creek-fed lake in Alabama. Bassmaster says Lake Y “could well represent the majority of small lakes and ponds scattered throughout the country.”
In Episode 1, James Hall, editor-in-chief of Bassmaster Magazine, introduces the project with our president, John Jones.
John first studied Lake Y in the spring and did a walkabout, identifying problems and opportunities.
Overall, John says “there are a lot of chances to grow a lot of fish,” but Lake Y also has a lot of problems that need to be addressed.
“Left unmanaged, small fisheries, say from 3 to 100 acres, can get out of balance a lot faster than you would imagine,” Bassmaster explains in its series description.
“Bass can become scarce from predation of other critters, or worse, overpopulate a lake and stunt. Non-desirable species (at least to hardcore bass anglers), like catfish, gar and carp, can create such a biomass in limited space that largemouth simply cannot thrive. Cover and structure can deteriorate, vegetation can choke out open water and water quality can become unbearable for fish in a matter of a few years.”
In the video, John advises that Lake Y owners start an improvement strategy with satellite photos identifying other water body influences and an examination of the lake’s history: when it was built, watershed influences and management approaches. He identified Lake Y as being off color and in a shallow ravine with a small dam.
A lot of people find a great dam site, John explains, but they don’t put money into deepening the lake, which could have cost 10 times as much. But that doesn’t have to be a hindrance, he adds.
His visual assessment also included evidence of otters, and identified issues surrounding the lake’s number and condition of boats, fish feeders and spillway.
It’s a beautiful lake, John says, but multi-owner lakes (as this one appears to be) have to be handled very differently, and multiple ownership could be a help or a hindrance with different priorities. Among many other observations, he also notes the creek could present some challenges with species diversity, and managers should probably come up with a catfish control program.
John notes, “You don’t have to spend a lot of money to have a great lake, but money speeds things up.” He says he asks customers to give him a budget or a timetable for goals. Now that the visual assessment is complete, the next Lake Y episode will focus on its electrofishing survey.
Electrofishing uses an electric current to briefly stun the fish population. This then allows for an accurate assessment of species, size, relative abundance and growth rates of a lake’s fish.
It’s an excellent tool for correcting an out-of-balance pond. Stunted fish or unwanted species can be easily and quickly removed as part of the service. And the survey acts as the reference point for a long-term pond management plan and provides clues for corrective stocking and harvest recommendations.
“In the end, we hope to inspire you to not settle for unimpressive or average fishing, because you can do something about it,” Bassmaster says.
Why Choose Lochow Ranch for Pond & Lake Management
Serving Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana, Lochow Ranch Pond & Lake Management proudly puts more than two decades of experience to work for you. Our team includes biologists, technicians and other professionals with deep expertise in pond and lake management services.
“We try to use water clarity to our advantage,” John says. “The perfect 
John says he’d add a couple of plant species that are easy to fish, not too invasive, would thrive and be easy and inexpensive to treat, as well as being preferred by grass carp. He says using EPA-approved herbicides or algaecides around the 
“Really, this is a very average lake,” John said, “which is a great starting point. This is what people are dealing with all over America. You’re overpopulated with small stunted 
While on the boat, Lee Schoech, one of our 
Recent Comments