My family owns a small farm pond and I am able to fish there about every weekend during the summer. Unfortunatly I am not able to catch too many bass and when i do catch bass they are usually less than 1 pound and under 12 inches. I'm almost positive our pond has some big bass. The pond is stocked with grass carp, bream, warmouth and LM bass. There are PLENTY of bream but i cant seem to catch bass! I mainly use soft plastics like worms crawled on the bottom. Any ideas on what I could use to catch more bass?

Thanks,

Stephen in SC

is the pond over stocked with bream? do you catch big bream, or are they all tiny?

one of the first things i like to do when fishing a lake i don't know much about is catch a few bream.

if i'm catchig good solid bream, i feel confident that the lake has a healthy bass population. if i'm catching bream no bigger than a crank bait on every cast, i think that suggests a poor bass population. the little bream aren't getting eaten and are overstocked.

There are a ton of bream and most are very big. They are just coming off the beds and ive been able to see little ones swimming everywhere in the pond. But all the ones i catch are pretty big, like 1-2 pounds. Ive also seen a lot of small bass swimming in the shallows but have yet to catch or see a big one. As ive said before i catch bass that are under 12" and less than 1 pound and see a ton of baby bass and such, but can never catch any of the big uns, and with all the babies it leads me to believe there should be quite a bit of big bass in there. I just ordered a 313-piece soft plastic lure kit from Bass Pro Shops so I'm hopin that will help a bit as I dont have a very big selection of lures right now. So any tips on using worms or any soft plastics would be helpful as well.

Thanks,

Stephen

Warmouths and carp   OH NO! These fish make it very hard to catch bass but how big is this pond acre wise?? Is there any cover?

Im not sure about the size. I might can find out this weekend though. Its fairly small I think. There is not much visible cover. Im not totally sure about the bottom of the pond. There is one part of the pond that has old bridge posts in it (about 8 posts) and a fallen tree next to the bridge. This is where i catch most of the small bass. All of the bigger bass caught in the pond have been in random places in the pond (like random places in the middle of the pond). THe biggest caught out of the pond was 10 pounds by my dad about 20 years ago caught on a purple worm. My biggest is a 5 pounder caught on half a cricket. Both of these were caught in the middle of the pond in random places???

About the warmouth, lately we have figured out that there seems to be an overload of them so we either keep them to eat if they are big enough or (i know it sounds cruel) throw them up on the bank for the foxes and such. This keeps the population of them down but they seem to be like guppies and breed all the time!

There is one of your problems then warmouths are very taritorial and won't give the bass a chance to get bigger take em out, plus they produce a lot! Take em out...

I use 3 baits in the fresh water ponds I fish frequently !.Floating worms mostly Zoom tricks/swamp crawlers and Manns Jelly Worms 6in.motoroil or blackgrape I fish em texas rigged 1/0 hook no weight Let em wiggle like a small snake 2.#7 Rapalas(Original and jointed) gold or silver 3. Bagleys small fry bream easecially if there are sunnies or bluegills in the pond. Ive been catching bigger fish this year by moving away fro any standing timber or llilly pads Looking for submerged weeds in a litttle deeperswater or downed trees close ot deeper water. My best day came next to a downed tree by swiming a worm over the top of some hydrilla. I use spinning rods med action with the lighest line you can get away with Remember to watch your profile on the water if you can see the fish (and the sun is behind you) the fish can see you I learned all this by trial and error and the fellas here and my pond fishing has been great so far

Bassin4life, thanks, i'll throw em up on the bank to give the land creatures a special meal next time i catch them (which will be this weekend Im sure).

Thanks for the tips the_muddy_man! Usually I dont use lures like rapala rattle traps or larger spinner baits because I could never get anything on em, but this past weekend I threw a rapala out in the pond and got a couple of strikes, couldnt land em though. The bass have seemed to slow down over the past few years. They used to be plentiful and we could catch them a lot but now that a new housing development has gone in nearby, we havent been able to catch much. We're guessing people from the development come down to our private pond and fish. But then again, what are they doing to catch all the bass that I'm not??

Thanks!!