Trophy Pond

06/10/2026

We have smallmouth bass for sale!

06/10/2026

The fastest growth rate I have seen documented for smallmouth bass in any of the scientific literature on the species talks about a few exceptional fish in a lake in Washington state that hatched out in March and were four inches long by October. We spawned our smallmouth in three ponds at our fish farm this year; in February, we drained those three ponds down to puddles and killed off the fish in the puddles with rotenone. We then refilled the ponds and moved our broodstock smallmouth into them the first week of March. Smallmouth fry began hatching out in April.

When bass fry first hatch, they’re about 1/8” long, so small you can barely see them. Several smallmouth that hatched from eggs as 1/8” fry in April 2026, are now already 4” long the second week of June - four inches of growth in two months.

Our broodstock came from Dale Hollow Lake, which produced the world record smallmouth in 1955, a fish that weighed eleven pounds fifteen ounces. We travel to Dale Hollow every year to catch more broodstock so we have plenty and also to refresh the genetics at our farm and guard against inbreeding.

We started raising smallmouth in 2020, but are just having our first legitimate crop this year. We had a few dozen smallmouth that hatched out in the spring of 2024 and were between eight and twelve inches long when we seined our larger broodstock in March 2025; those same fish averaged over two pounds each this March. These fish will make two pounds easily in two years from stocking as fingerlings if stocked into a pond with just a decent forage base.

What will happen if they’re stocked into a larger pond or smaller lake that has lots and lots of forage? You’ll eventually have eight- or even ten-pound smallmouth.

12/21/2025

New blog post about our Florida bass:

We have been growing our own pure Florida bass since 2019. We travel to Florida every year to catch more bass from the wild to bring back to our farm to improve the genetics of our fish. Some of our broodstock came from a famous farm in Texas renowned for their pure Florida bass genetics; but most

01/18/2025

New blog post on female-only largemouth stocking:

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04/18/2024

This is from an episode we filmed last week on a four-acre pond that Trophy Pond stocked with pure Florida largemouth in 2018 and 2019. A nine-pound largemouth was caught from the pond in September 2022. On the day of this video, in about four hours of fishing, we caught ten three-pounders, four four-pounders, a 4.5-pounder, and the fish in this video. Imagine what this pond will be like in another five years.

04/16/2023

This is a 1.5-acre pond that we have managed since 2014. All these fish were caught in one day's fishing. Check out this episode in a couple weeks on the Pursuit channel, 12:30 p.m. Saturday!

04/07/2023

One of our employees caught a 6.75-lb. Florida bass a couple weeks ago while we were filming for our TV show that's airing this year on the Pursuit channel. This pond has only had bass in it for four and a half years:
https://www.trophypond.com/.../are-florida-bass-really...