Talkin’ Fish with the Bassmaster

Do you want to find out how to get larger Bass in your pond? You can learn all about taking care of your fish with the Bassmaster.

My name is Ray Scott, and I’m known worldwide as the Bassmaster. And I say that with all due respect and thanks to the good fortune of being able to make a living fishing. And we are today at one of my lakes, the oldest lake on my property, here in, just south, about fifteen eighteen miles south of Montgomery, the capital of Alabama. I was born and raised there.

I always dreamed of having my own fishing hole, and the first one I ever made was about ten or eleven feet across. Literally, it was about four times the size of a bathtub. And I sat for hours and hours, and sometimes weekends dreaming on my own fish pond.

Well, finally I got one. And I got busy learning all about it, and you know what’s fascinating? I’ve never learned all that I need to know. And you know you get that sometimes, a plateau of nothing else, but then I find out there are ways to increase the quality of the fish, the experience that we share, with all the structure, and the things that I’ve been able to do in this lake.

I made good fishing, but as I’ve said on numerous occasions, I can recall thinking, you know, you get to a point in life, and you think there’s nothing else. And then I found out, I thought I knew it anyway, but I found out that if you want big things, you have got to feed small things. To have good quality Bass, which I happen to have on this body of water and my other waters, is because I take the time to concentrate on the groceries that they, the bass eats, and that’s the Bluegill and the other small sunfish that inhabits the water.

You’ll have a good fishing anywhere, but you can have sensational fishing and certainly population increases, and a lot better quality fish. And everybody I know, want some larger bass, always. But it’s a fascinating study, and I’ve been a slow learner, but a few years ago I started looking into the concentration of feeding my fish, and I fed the fish and they didn’t do that much better, but I was not analyzing what I was feeding them.

And honest-to-goodness, I know this sounds crazy, but we are what we eat. I’ve said it over and over again, and the quality of the food that the Purina people put out is embarrassing to me, that I was so slow, thought I knew it all. But I know now that I can see the enhancement of the quality of the fish in both the Bluegill and certainly the Bass. It’s a remarkable experience to see it happen, and it’s so inexpensive relatively, and it’s wonderful.

To me, it’s a lot like having a nice little garden. You can nurse the garden, you can prune it, you can trim it, and I say you should do the same thing with fish. You have to take a few fish out, particularly if it’s a rare rich lake like this with lots of fish if you want to optimize for bigger fish then you’ve got to take out a few of the eaters. You can’t put ten cows on an acre of grass. It won’t work, and the same thing happens when you have too many Bass and too many fish in a lake, but with a reasonable attitude toward the population control, the most thing is to feed the fish. It’s the single most important thing you do.

Purina has some eggheads, I don’t know who they are, some PhD somewhere studied this day and night, and those people have really seriously put the science to what to feed fish and they have taken it to the end. I’m telling you, they spent millions developing the absolute finest products that you can feed fish, and I’m talking about the Bluegill and in many cases the Bass.

So all I can say is this, if you guys are out there and you want to have better fishing, it’s a fun game, and it’s the most gratifying thing in the world to see better fishing come along with the simple idea like feed them and feeding them regularly with the right stuff. Purina hit the, knock the ball, a homerun, and you can take advantage of that if you just wakeup. See you later.