Expert Pond Stocking in Tennessee, Part II

We recently made a blog post about a two-acre pond in middle Tennessee that is on track to eventually break the Tennessee state record for bluegill. Some people might think that pond is a fluke, that perhaps we just got lucky. There is of course another pond we have posted about, one which we didn’t stock as a new pond but have managed since 2014, which recently produced a two-pound-fourteen-ounce bluegill, only two ounces shy of tying the present state record, three ounces shy of breaking it. But this two-part series of posts is all about the difference choosing the right company to stock your pond can make for the future of said pond.

Make no mistake: there is no more important moment in all the history of your pond. Choosing the right company can make a more profound difference in the quality of your fishing three or five or ten years down the road than you can imagine right now, if you've never had top-level management - because it’s the difference between just having fishing perhaps a little bit better than what you can find on public water, or fishing the like of which you never thought possible.

Some people might question our assertion that that two-acre pond in middle Tennessee really has a chance at breaking the state record for bluegill. “How could you ever know that,” they might say.

Our answer to that question would be very simple: because we manage another pond that is also on track to break the state record, and may well have already produced a fish large enough to break the record if it had been weighed (it wasn’t, and was released so it’s still swimming in the pond).

We stocked this pond as a new pond in March 2016, shortly after the landowners had us lime it upon our recommendation. Here’s a brief pictorial timeline of bluegill growth in that pond: