Outdoor Lunch With Chef Todd

Today we had a wild game outdoor lunch with Chef Todd at the hooked on fishing park. It was delicious as usual. He whipped up a batch of homemade cole slaw, grilled some elk and venison burgers, and topped it off with grilled peaches!

Charlie Bracket also helped out with his slow roasted vegetables and fresh mako shark and Todd Clanin brought in a slow cooked hunk of smoked pig shoulder. For those of you who didnt make it out, you definitely missed out!

Even with the 100 degree heat, we had 60 people come out for lunch today!!! Here are some pics of the event and the view looking out of the pavilion at the park.






We have been working extremely hard for the last 3 years building this park and this summer we were able to take over 1000 senior citizens, special needs folks and children fishing all free of charge!!! We still have a couple big events left at the park this year. We are having another outdoor lunch with Chef Todd in two weeks and also a big year end fishing derby at the end of september with a top prize of $500 and a big fish fry and wild game feed at the event as well- everyone is invited and there will be more details available soon.

The big fishing derby will help us celebrate the end of a great year of fishing at the park! Thanks to all of the volunteers who made this year a great success!!!! (if you didnt get the opportunity to volunteer or take a group of kids fishing this year, please contact me and I could defininetly use your help for the fishing derby and for next summer!

Best Bass Fishing Lake In Illinois?

On Saturday I had the privilege of fishing with professional fisherman Steve Ryan and Dale Rothstein. They have been fishing in exotic places around the world filming and photographing fish for people like In-Fisherman, Rapala, Frabill, Pflueger, etc. It was kind of awesome that guys I have been watching on TV fishing the best waters in the world actually came to Central Illinois to fish with me!

The air was already hot at 8 am, there weren't many clouds in the sky and the water was a blistering 86 degrees. Here was my chance to show the world some of the cutting edge fish projects we have been creating and we had to pick the dog days of summer to do so. I was a little nervous at first, but as the fish kept biting and the cameras kept clicking I was able to settle down, relax and enjoy the day.

Our first lake we went to is called Mike's lake at Otter Creek Preserve. It is a brand new 18 acre lake I started stocking as it was filling back in 2007. This lake is extremely intensively micro-managed to grow superior genetic largemouth bass. Average relative weights for these young fish are 130%! Here are some pics from this lake, we fished here from 8:30 to 11:30 am. Also along on the trip was Ryan Pudik with Timber Creek Land Company. They are the developers and owners of Otter Creek Preserve. They have over 225 acres of intensively managed water on this property!

This is just a fraction of the fish we caught at this first lake. All of the pictures of two fish were caught simultaneously. Monster bluegills hitting spinnerbaits, a bonus catfish on a senko, multiple double and triple hook ups on bass, and we landed 35 bass over 3 lbs! This is a fun lake with enormous potential!

Next we headed out fishing on Big Lake. This lake is between 150-175 acres and is also a brand new construction. We created this lake to be the very best bass fishing lake in Illinois. Every square inch of this lake was designed for raising trophy largemouth bass. Most lakes in Illinois are created for water retention for subdivisions or strip pits from mining coal. This lake was designed only for the purpose of recreational fishing!

We made brush and tree piles with bulldozers along with many contours, shelfs, and flats. We also created fishing reefs the size of football fields with 100's of tons of pea gravel and river rock, added 1000's of tons of rip rap, and placed over 330 big PVC structures on those reefs. We strategically keep water moving in certain areas of the lake with a big vertex aeration system and also have 2 big forage wetlands that drain into the lake.

The lake consists of 30 acres of flooded timber, 50 acres of deep water, and the rest is all food producing littoral zone with many islands, weedbeds, and miles of shoreline! Our forage base is gizzard shad, bluegill, golden shiners, fathead minnows, crawfish, yellow perch, and annual stockings of threadfin shad.

This lake is on pace to grow double digit bass in about 2 years. I have stocked several strains of largemouth bass from various regions of the country. I am a huge believer in starting with the right genetics. Even though this lake is still very young we had alot of fun fishing here already too! Its amazing how fast fish grow under ideal conditions with no limiting factors.

We fished the big lake until about 4 pm and then headed out of Otter Creek Preserve and over to my lake to fish for bluegill. Since we had been fishing in bass boats all day already we decided to just sit on the docks and cast out some nightcrawlers. Here are the pics from my lake. We caught some huge male bluegill, a real nice bass, and a mixed bag of smallmouth, crappie, catfish, and walleye.

8:30 pm and we are all done fishing for the day and snapped this last pic:

Noah's Rope Swing Backflip

Noah loves jumping off the high dock, going down big waterslides, and swimming across the lake with me. Anyhow he has been talking about wanting to do a backflip off the the high dock and also how bad he wants to do the rope swing like the big kids. This afternoon he was able to fulfill both of his young lifelong dreams at the same time. He is the only 2 year old I know who would come out of this with a big grin on his face!



After you watch it again a few times, check out his reaction following his first rope swing ride. I apologize the quality is so bad, we were using our digital camera.



Here is Noah jumping off the high dock. He jumped for the first time last summer when he was one year old with some help from his dad and uncle. This year he leaps off that thing.



We had alot of fun today. After church we headed straight to the lake and right into the water. I had alot of fun playing with the kids for a few hours and then towards evening shot some arrows with my brother and brother in law for awhile.

I am practicing with Chad's homemade bow made out of hedge wood. I am fairly confident I can bring down a deer at about 20 yards, but still need quite a bit of practice to stretch out my range just a bit. This bow shoots about 60 lbs of pressure and is just alot of fun. Hopefully this fall I will be posting some pics of my first deer with this bow!

Lazy Summer Afternoon and New Fish Farm

Friday night shooting clay pigeons, feasting at the burger barge, midnight poker, and then gorging on some more pizza all kind of set the stage for a couple of consecutive lazy summer afternoons. My oh my has it been a long time since I have done anything like that and boy oh boy am I still feeling it on Monday.

There is just something about laying down to sleep and then waking up a few minutes later to go fishing at 5 am that just made me awful tired. So tired that a good nights sleep saturday evening didnt even help quench my thirst for more Z's.

Anyhow I spent all day Sunday at the lake and it was almost too hot outside to nap comfortably. Here are some pics from Saturday evening fishing trip with Ken Hoerr and his family. We had alot of fun catching hybrid striped bass and even more fun getting everyone to hold one for some pics:

For those who don't know, Ken is one of the preachers at our church. I wasn't in church on Sunday but was told from a few different people that me and fishing and our fishing trip the day before were tied into his sermon for the morning service. Interesting to say the least....kind of makes me a bit worried for some reason though to be talked about over the pulpit?

Sunday afternoon my dad and I sneaked away for a bit and caught a whole bunch of catfish and some real nice bluegills and bass. We used jigheads tipped with 1 inch pieces of night crawlers. This is bass number 39 that was stocked from Arkansas in 2008. Look at the body size compared to the mouth size of this fish! Relative weight is 143%!


This male bluegill is an absolute monster! Probably one of the biggest bluegill I have ever caught:

Lots of cool stuff happening at Herman Brothers Pond Management! I just purchased this big building with 10 acres of land and plan on starting my very own fish farm here in central Illinois! Feed trained smallmouth bass, largemouth bass, and hybrid striped bass will be my main species that I will focus on raising. I will also have lots of holding tanks in the building for big shipments of fish from arkansas and minnesota. I already bring in big truckloads of every size and species of fish every spring and fall, but now will start raising my own specialty fish with a huge focus on making my own genetics. Gonna be lots of fun!

Here is a pic of the building and the land.