Pond Boss Magazine: Evaluating the Situation

If you’ve never read a complete series of articles in Pond Boss, read the next few issues. It will completely shape your understanding of how ponds and lakes should work…in the very least, it will congeal some of the concepts you know and bring to light others you’ve not thought about.

That’s a bold statement, right?

Good. Take it for what it’s worth.

Be prepared for quite a few “palm to forehead” moments.

Over 46-plus years, I’ve studied a significant number of private ponds and lakes as a fisheries biologist and lake management consultant. There’s no way to track all of them, but I’d bet my eyes and brain have been tested by close to 10,000 of them.

Every lake, every one of them, has limiting factors…most have several. Heck, most have too many.

For those of you who have followed these pages, our podcasts, videos, and the decades of information, you know our five basics of pond and lake management. “Happy Water, Habitat, Food Chain, Genetics, and Harvest are the core fundamentals to dig deeper in how to manage your ponds and lakes.

Each of those “Big Five” precepts can get as complicated as you want it to be. Usually, the lake brings forth its own complications, due to its own circumstances. The watershed is too big…or too small. Habitat is lacking, food chain is out of whack. No one paid attention to genetics. Fish haven’t been harvested for years.

I’ve met a lake that is as close to “perfect” as it can get. And I can’t wait to share what makes it so.

Let’s start at the start.

I got an introductory email from a subscriber in October, 2024. He’d been following Pond Boss and our weekly podcasts for sometime and had recently signed a contract to buy a ranch outside Hico, Texas. That ranch boasted a 104-lake sitting on a 14,000-acre catchment basin. It’s a flood control lake in the Bosque River watershed, impounded in 1974. He had heard stories from the realtor that the lake produced some giant fish, double-digit bass and catfish way bigger than that.

It's easy to say those things, and it was easy to be skeptical.

The owner-to-be was asking if I was interested in helping him evaluate the lake and do what we need to do to grow some sure-enough big bass.

I was intrigued enough to at least go take a look. Up until this one, I’d never met a flood-control lake that was worth a flip as a fishing lake. Flood prevention sites were built by the federal government from 1958 until 1974, with the sole purpose to capture huge rain events and release the water in an orderly fashion so downstream communities would be safe from historical floods.

These lakes have huge dams, giant emergency spillways and primary spillway, usually made of concrete.

As soon as the family closed on this property, late November, 2024, the excited new owner rang my number. I met him there on a blustery day. We made our way to the concrete boat ramp, welcomed by big winds and whitecaps blowing northwest to southeast. He asked if I wanted to go out on the lake.

Not today…

But I was immediately intrigued by what looked like a plankton bloom we usually see in spring time. Nah, couldn’t be…the water was too cool. It was late fall…plankton blooms are long gone by then.

As we got to know each other, I did what I always do. “What are the goals?” Then, “Why did you buy this place?” I go through a litany of questions to get to know a new client and see what the mission truly is. His desires were pretty simple. He wants to grow some huge bass and have excellent catch rates.

And a 100-acre lake was way outside his comfort zone to manage.

We decided to electrofish the lake within a few weeks and see what kinds of samples we could capture. Rarely do I electrofish any lake in December, but since he’d just closed on it and was excited, it made sense to at least see what we might find.

On December 13, with a borrowed electrofishing boat, we headed out to see what we could find. Visibility was about 24-inches, with a green tint. As I stared into the water column, it was apparent it carried a bloom. I could see all kinds of tiny living organisms clouding the water. It made zero sense to me…at the time.

Water temperature was 56 degrees F. I was puzzled. Lakes don’t have a plankton bloom at that temperature. This lake did.

We electrofished two hours. I was studying the lake as we went. I love to see where fish are distributed, congregated, different species, and then we weigh and measure fish collected.

In a “normal” lake, we might capture a few catfish, some bass, bluegills, and in a lake this size and on this watershed, I wasn’t surprised to see gizzard shad, common carp and crappie, both white and black.

What was very surprising on that cool day, in a flood control lake, was how many of each species we caught. We caught more than 60 bass, up to nine-pounds. Most were in that 2–4-pound class, with three really nice fish. I was mildly surprised with more than 60 crappies, all of them “keepers” …11-15-inches long. Thick shouldered, too. But what was simply astonishing was the number of channel catfish. We electrofished 66 of those whiskered things, up to six or seven pounds.

I was processing what all this data meant, knowing how rare it is to see those numbers of different species of fish in a dadgum flood control lake.

Flood control lakes have zero habitat built into them. Zero.

We had a little confab. I told him the next step was to build a map of the lake bottom. The water had all the appearances of being “happy” and water chemistry lab results proved it. Alkalinity was about 180 ppm; pH was 7.5 and there were no other minerals and ions that were sketchy. Water was healthy.

We needed a bathymetry map to see the contours and figure out how to create a habitat improvement plan.

That was done in January, 2025. We also decided, based on that initial electrofishing survey, we needed to harvest some catfish. I headed back over there with that borrowed electrofishing boat, and we captured 40 catfish, ranging in size from 2-5 pounds. What was interesting to me, as a fisheries biologist, was where we got those fish. They were in basically two different spots in the lake, clustered in groups, in water in the low 50’s.

They were in water less than six-feet deep, in areas where there were lots of small sapling willow trees and standing chaff from weed that had grown there in a drought about two years prior.

As you read through this and upcoming articles, please capture and think about all these clues. Look at this lake like a jigsaw puzzle. The more pieces you can put together, the clearer the picture becomes.

Catfish are a clue.

I told my new client I’d like to take those catfish and donate them to a guy I know who would clean them and donate the meat to a food bank. He agreed. Channel catfish don’t play a role in this lake management plan.

Bumfuzzled by the catch rates, the data was rolling around in my mind. This lake wasn’t making sense, yet.

On the way home with 40 nice-sized catfish in a cooler, I couldn’t reach the guy who would take those fish.

Not one to waste such a good catch of fish, I chose to butcher them myself.

That event began to give me some clarity. I skinned and popped the head off the first catfish, a two-pounder. Along its back, the fish had a layer of yellow fat. Yellow fat?

Another clue.

I knew from experience, that channel catfish with a primary diet of plants, would store yellow fat. It’s got something to do with xanthophylls, which are plant-derived carotenoids. Digging into their digestive tracts painted the picture. Every one of those catfish were loaded with black gunk, willow leaves, pieces of terrestrial weeds and different types of plant material they’d vacuumed from the lake bottom.

Four of them had 3-4” bluegills.

There’s another clue. Channel catfish are what scientists call, “Opportunistic omnivores”. They are like teenage boys. Go to the fridge, if there’s meat, that’s their first choice. But if the meat is gone, they’ll eat vegetation.

Back to the task at hand. After butchering that first fish, and seeing all that yellowness, I decided not to clean the rest of the fish until I tasted that first one. After skinning and gutting it, and poring over the stomach and intestine contents, I filleted it. Put a fillet on a paper plate and microwaved it, like a taste-tester might do. There was very little fishy odor and the flesh was really tasty.

So, I cleaned all forty of those creatures, vacuum-sealed them and put them in the freezer.

Oh…another clue…although these catfish were storing yellow fat in their backs, there was limited stores of yellow fat in their gut cavities and relative weights were consistently around 85%.

Next, I had to figure out the mysteries bubbling in my brain.

I went to GoogleEarth and went back in time to get a better understanding of that lake. Back in 2022, the area was in a drought. The lake dropped at least 5 feet, exposing about 30% of the lake bottom. It was like that for about 18 months…long enough for willow saplings and weeds to grow in that 30-ish-acre area.

Those two bare spots were where we captured the catfish.

Here’s your homework.

Think about these clues.

Look at the bathymetry map.

Recognize there was very little habitat in that lake…but it produces a surprising fishery.

How can it do that?

Next issue, we will evaluate the bathymetry map and dig deeper into the fishery.

There are some solid reasons we saw exceptional numbers of good fish, in winter of all seasons.

Inside Pond Boss

Hatchery Ponds

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