Summertime Multi-Species Fishing Trip

I had the privilege of taking out a group of Steffa's and co fishing on Wednesday. I haven't had a chance to do much guiding this summer, but hopefully will start taking out some more trips this fall and especially winter. When I say hopefully I am implying that my lake management season is rapidly coming to an end and I hopefully can start booking some guided fishing trips and electrofishing surveys to fill in some dead time between the seasons.

Anyhow here are some of the pics from our trip wednesday. We had alot of fun and caught lots of fish! We caught hybrid stripers, walleye, muskie, big bluegill, crappie, catfish, largemouth and smallmouth!! Jighead tipped with nightcrawler bounced on the bottom was the main weapon of choice, but a handful (small handful) of fish were caught with an ugly crankbait.

Lots of different species of fish and more than 10 bluegill over one pound each!! Anyhow for the first time this year I actually don't have much scheduled on the calendar in the weeks ahead. Trying to fill out the rest of September and October completely we actually are going to try some print marketing for the first time. Brook designed this postcard that we are sending out to over 500 lake owners in peoria county and 250 other lake owners across Illinois. Very curious (and hopeful) of what the response will be once people start getting these cards in the mail? Currently we are heading on a couple road trips towards Chicago, Carlinville, and Indiana and I am hoping to fill in the road trips and the rest of my open dates with more Electrofishing Surveys. If you know anyone who may be interested in an electrofishing survey now would be the time to book for the fall!

Noah and Willow go Fishing

Yesterday I took a big group of people fishing (I will post those pics and report later). After the group left I went down on the dock and let the kids fish for about 30 minutes. Mae and Tate were on the dock too, but Willow and Noah were the ones most into the mini fishing trip. After about 2 minutes of Noah fighting this big fish I realized that my camera also took video so here goes his epic battle:


The kids caught 14 fish all by themselves in about a half hour. Here is a pic of Noah and Willows best fish:

Healthy Ponds and Trophy Fish Newsletter

I wanted to say thank you to all of my clients this year who purchased lake
supplies or services from Herman Brothers Pond Management! I sent out this newsletter to all of our online clients and the response was actually much better than I anticipated. Here is the email newsletter:

This email is kind of long,
because I have a lot to say and I promise I will not flood your inbox with
future emails. I figured I would just pack it all into one annual
newsletter. I am reaching out to you in order to provide you with some
helpful pond management practices, to let you know about our end of the
season sale, and hopefully get some pond and fish pictures from you.

We have been experimenting with and managing 1000's of acres of water and
would be glad to help you with your pond specifically. Give me a call or
shoot me an email with all the details about your pond, and I would be glad
to help you create a customized management plan to create healthy water and
grow big fish! If you are in the Midwest and would like us to visit your
body of water for an electrofishing survey or extremely customized lake
management plan just give me a call for more information about getting on
our fall road trip schedule. We will be heading to Missouri, Iowa, Indiana,
and all over Illinois in the months of September and October.

One generalized tip for healthy water would be to apply 12 packets of HB
Blend Bacteria
per surface acre of water once the vegetation in your pond starts dying back
for the season. Our blend of bacteria will eat up that decaying vegetation
along with some of the organic muck and excess nutrients to give your pond a
great jump-start for the 2011 season!

To help us close out the season we are offering 10% off your next online
purchase in 2010! Just use coupon code HBPOND10 at checkout to save 10% off
of your entire order with FREE SHIPPING at http://products.hbpondmanagement.com/. Now is
the best time to stock up on items you know you will need in the future or
pick up the perfect gift for the pondmeister in your family.


Last bit of information for anyone still reading this far down is about our
fishing blog- http://thediaryofalakenerd.blogspot.com/. We update this blog
regularly with all of our fishing stories, pictures, articles, information
and videos. I would absolutely love to put pictures, stories, and videos of
your pond or your fish onto the blog as well. Please email them over to me
and I would love to feature them online. I think this could be a lot of fun!
Here is a pic from one of our featured properties and our latest blog post.



Those could be your fish! Growing big fish in small ponds is very possible!!

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: