One of the nicest guys you'll ever meet has one of the coolest boats around. Check out this bad boy.
Jeff Blaser (Private Waters Specialist, NGPC) and his electrofishing boat
The sample wasn't encouraging. We found no bass and lots of small gills. A handful of near-spawn fatheads minnows were also present along with thousands and thousands and thousands of tadpoles. Predation is low if not non-existent. Bottom line, we need to prevent the winter kills and add LMB. On the up side, the Secchi Disk reading was good.
For those who aren't familiar with the electrofishing process, here are some pics and an overview.
On private waters, finding the boat ramp can be the hardest part sometimes.
Here is the electrofishing in progress. One man drives the boat and another wears insulated gloves and holds a long-handled net. If you look closely, you can see that I'm standing on a rubber mat. When weight is applied to the mat, the current flows into the water through two metal hoops that can best be seen in the first picture of this post running ahead of the boat. Jeff maneuvers the boat into spots likely to be holding fish such as stickups, vegetation, points, etc. I watch for fish to float to the surface, net them and deposit them in the live well directly behind me.
After just a short time on the water, we had all the gills we needed so we just drove around shocking gills for fun and leaving them on the water to wake up later.
"What the hell was that Bob?"
"War of the worlds, my friend. Our time is short."
Just kidding, we were actually looking for bass or crappie, but never found any.
Unneeded gills, waiting to wake up
Once we had all our fish, we pulled into a quiet cove to weigh measure and take scale samples from at least 10 fish in size classes of 10mm.
Scale samples were stored in envelopes. Later, Jeff will make slides and be able to determine the age, like looking at rings on a tree. Then we'll know if the number of gills is impacting/slowing their growth rate/potential.
When finished, we thanked Jeff and helped him load up his boat so he could head to the next private pit. This service is yet another reason I love the NGPC.
