Is It Really Possible to Consistently Grow Trophy Fish in Private Lakes and Ponds?

Imagine hiring a heart surgeon who told you right out of the gate that all this heart stuff was pretty unpredictable, and he couldn’t really guarantee anything other than he would try hard. He went on to explain that medical science was a constantly evolving field, and perhaps eventually we would know enough to get consistent results, but for right now, some of his patients survived his surgery, and many did not. Would you even think of hiring that doctor?

And yet one of our competitors penned an article for a magazine, and has it on their website, stating just that about lake and pond management. The article claims we’re ten years away from being able to consistently manage private lakes or ponds for trophy fish.

And this was written by their top biologist. And their company is many times larger than mine is.

To be fair, that larger company has tried a few different times to buy me out, and they also said they would make me their chief fisheries biologist. I just wasn’t interested in letting someone else dictate the direction of my company, mainly because I knew then that I was getting results neither they nor anyone else did, and I knew that eventually those results would bring me more of the best accounts.

I’ll cut right to the chase: we have never had a customer who had us work on his or her pond or lake for at least five years unbroken, who hasn’t caught trophy largemouth or trophy bluegill from his pond or lake. Not one. Zero.

There’s a wide spectrum of folks who hire companies like ours: on one end of the spectrum, we have customers who pay us to be at their pond monthly in the warm months, and every other month even in winter, to refill fish feeders and monitor the overall health of the pond. On the other end of the spectrum, we stock ponds every year where the landowner buys his fish for his new pond from us, and we never hear from him again. In between those two ends of the spectrum are people whom we help regularly, but not monthly, some more often than others. But when we help people, and they listen and implement our recommendations, they catch big fish. Period.

Don’t get me wrong: consistent work is required to grow exceptional fish, and that consistency must be maintained over time to yield the results you want. But consistent work with the right methods produces trophy fish, predictably, in a wide variety of water bodies. If your pond is being professionally managed, and you’re taking the recommendations of the management company, and you’re not getting the results you had hoped for, it’s not you - it’s the advice you’re being given.

I don’t delve a lot into specifics of our management methods in this blog, nor do I do so on our TV show on the Pursuit Channel. There’s a very specific reason for this: God has shown me some things about bass and bluegill biology that to this point he has not revealed to my competitors; that’s why they’re telling you they’re still waiting on new knowledge to be able to consistently deliver results, while I am telling you I can do that for you today.

The ironic thing about all this is that God didn’t whisper this special knowledge to me in a dream: I just read a lot in fisheries science, and I pay attention to what I read, and I learn from every lake and pond I work on, and I think. It’s really that simple.

If you’re tired of waiting on your lake consultant to learn enough to be able to effectively manage your lake, call us and see what it’s like to experience immediate, dramatic positive results that put you on the fast track to having a better fishery than you ever dreamed possible.