Are Florida Bass Really that Hard to Catch?
Some people in the lake and pond management world will tell you that you shouldn’t stock Florida bass in your pond because you won’t be able to catch them. If these people are to be believed, those mean ol’ Florida bass will just eat all your forage and you’ll never hook one until the day they die of old age.
Mostly these people just want to sell you F1 largemouth. “They’re easy to catch!” they say. Never mind the fact that an F1 largemouth from a hatchery will be half Florida bass, which means it can just as easily get the catchability gene from the Florida bass as it can the northern bass. Back when we used to stock F1s, before we knew about the genetic problems their offspring have, it happened multiple times that I would have a landowner complain about not being able to catch his F1s. Not Floridas - F1s.
There are dishonest fish sellers in this country that are claiming Florida bass have a much smaller geographic range than what they actually have. This study in Oklahoma found that Florida bass had better survival rates than northern largemouth, and grew larger than either northern or F1 largemouth - one Florida bass in the study reached eight pounds five ounces at under four years of age, and the study notes that the bass were stocked at a high density and with insufficient forage:
https://seafwa.org/sites/default/files/journal-articles/WRIGHT-31-38.pdf
But back to this idea that Florida bass can’t be caught on lures. This myth is easy to disprove if you just think a little. If Florida bass were so impossible to catch on artificials, there would never be a bass tournament held in the state of Florida. Counting local tournaments, how many thousands of bass tournaments are held in the state of Florida every year? Bassmaster has a major event there every year, and has had more than one Classic there.
How about a more specific, concrete example? Trophy Pond’s owner, Walt Foreman, and his construction supervisor Willpenny Smith fished a five-acre pond last Thursday while filming for our TV show, “Trophy Pond,” that airs on the Pursuit Channel at 12:30 p.m. central time on Saturdays. We fished for five hours and caught twenty-eight bass, all on lures, including one that weighed six pounds thirteen ounces, and another that weighed four pounds four ounces. The pond has only had bass since the end of November 2018, so four years and four months. Florida bass have an average lifespan of sixteen years (https://tpwd.texas.gov/huntwild/wild/species/lmb/). Imagine what this pond will look like in another twelve years.
