LAKE MANAGEMENT
Lake management for a fish population on a fifty-acre lake is entirely different from a one-acre pond. A 2016 study on public lakes in Georgia found that the single most significant determining factor in the size of bluegill in an impoundment was impoundment size, followed by phosphorus content of the water. Large impoundments have many inherent advantages over smaller ones, most notably their size. Still, some challenges are unique to larger lakes, such as the fact that any management action taken on the lake, just because of the size of the water body, will cost more than it will on a small pond. We have many years of lake management experience working on larger impoundments, both private and public, up to 300 acres in size; we know what it takes to make an impact on these larger water bodies, what works and what doesn’t, and can get your lake headed in the right direction sooner rather than later.
WHAT IS LAKE MANAGEMENT?
Lake Management.
We talk a lot on our blog about the importance of not making mistakes when stocking a new pond. The magnitude of lake management and stocking decisions is significantly increased on large lakes, simply because unlike a small pond that can be chemically renovated via rotenone relatively inexpensively, a 50- or 100-acre lake will require a small fortune to renovate, and that’s before the cost of re-stocking with fish. Once a mistake is made; generally, it’s there to stay unless the owner happens to have oil fields in his family. More than once, we have worked on lakes over 50 acres stocked by a previous company with a fish that was now causing long-term problems. Ideally, the right management company would be hired the first time and these mistakes avoided, which is why, if you’re embarking on the management of your large lake for the first time, you need to call us. If you’ve been unfortunate enough to hire a company that made your lake worse rather than better, the mistakes can be mitigated; but here again, you have to have a company that knows their stuff making the corrections.
Anyone can make claims online.
Be aware that there are companies out there who represent themselves as experts in lake management, when in fact they are anything but; we have come behind more than a couple of these companies, more than a few times, and sometimes their lack of knowledge about basic principles of managing large lakes in the South can be alarming. Often these companies are sending out biologists who were in college a year or two ago to assess your lake; just as you wouldn’t want to have open-heart surgery performed on you by a doctor who was right out of college, you shouldn’t trust someone that green with the future of your lake. Inexperienced consultants will make mistakes, and on a large lake, those mistakes are amplified.
The good news is, when you hire the real experts in lake management in Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Kentucky, we can dramatically transform your lake and take it to a level you never thought possible. Some of our greatest successes have come on large lakes.
If you own a lake of ten acres or more and you’re not regularly catching bass and bluegill bigger than what most anglers have ever even seen in person, your lake is not being appropriately managed. Call us today and see for yourself the profound difference that real management can make.
