If you’re looking to put some fillets in the freezer or hang a lunker on the wall, the first thing you have to do is find the fish.  Fishermen spend millions of dollars every year on fish finders and GPS navigation equipment in search of the best hot spot on every lake across the country.  How do you turn it around and have the fish look for you? 

Brad Metzler, a Wildlife and Fishery Sciences graduate of Texas A&M University, has created an attraction that fish can’t resist.  During years of research as a fisheries management consultant and owner of Pond King Inc., Brad developed his concept by trial and error.  “When we did our electroshock surveys, we would consistently find fish in certain types of cover or structure.  All we had to do from there was to find the best way to imitate Mother Nature.”  His answer has been dubbed the “Honey Hole Tree”.

 

Sometimes the best new hot spot is the one you make yourself.  Many people in the past have used Christmas trees to bait fishing holes out in the open or underneath their dock.  The problems with this technique is that the trees eventually rot and many times you end up hooking a limb and breaking off the line when fishing over them.  The Honey Hole Tree was designed so that it could be fished through without any hookups, and since it is made of plastic it will never rot.  It does float like a real tree so it can be weighted to the bottom or suspended at a particular depth.

 

Many articles have been written about incorporating different types of structure in new ponds and lakes.  Excavators usually cut trenches or build points or islands to imitate some of the land features found naturally in larger lakes.  “The presence of structure at different depths is important for lake management especially concerning the growth and propagation of bass and crappie.  Many of the lakes that we survey don’t have any underwater structure at all,” says Metzler.  “We usually place clusters of 3 to 5 trees in 6 to 8 feet of water because that’s where adult fish spend the majority of there life in small ponds and lakes.  The added structure gives fish an area to collect and presents an ambush point for them to feed from.” 

 

During the course of the product development Brad also designed a shallow water cover geared toward protecting and providing spawning habitat for baitfish.  “The most important factor to growing trophy gamefish in private ponds and lakes is producing lots of forage fish.” says, Metzler.  This secondary creation is fittingly called “The BaitMaker”.  It measures 5 feet in diameter and about 22 inches tall.  The 90 tubes that spring up from the dome base provide a good tight protective area for juvenile fish and plenty of room for egg attachment.

 

So if you aren’t finding the fish like you used to, you might want to consider changing your strategy and baiting your very own “Honey Hole”.