Who likes lily pads?

[moguy1973]

It has some large grass carp in it that probably need to be removed and some smaller ones added in.  

[snagged in outlet 3]

Would grass carp eat lily pads? 

[Al Agnew]

Don't think grass carp eat lily pads.

Bismarck Lake used to be full of pads.  I had a blast for a few years there, until some other guys figured out how to fish them.  There were so many and so thick that you couldn't use a boat with a trolling motor in them, and everybody else seemed to think that paddling was against the law or something.  So I'd take a canoe and paddle way back in them.  What I was looking for was something different.  Small openings were okay, but if there was a very small opening against a log, or against a clump of some other kind of vegetation, it was magic.  I devised a lure I really liked, by taking one of the early weedless hollow frog lures and putting a section of heavy wire on the front of it with a buzzbait blade.  Cast it up on the pads, bring it slowly to the opening, and buzz it fairly slowly across the opening.  I got some incredible blow-ups that way, and caught a pile of 3-6 pounders.

Then it got to where the pads were so thick you could hardly find any openings, and also milfoil started getting thick within the pads, and it became almost impossible to find openings to fish.  I really haven't spent hardly any time there since then.

[moguy1973]

Yeah, the grass carp will only eat stuff like milfoil,  coontail, and other grasses like those. 

[Flysmallie]

I agree that it needs to be managed with some harvest on the bass. Do it right and it won't diminish the fishing but it will help the quality of fish. 

And like Wrench said, nothing is going to die off. If you let it go it will just be more and more each year. But rather than trying to eliminate it I would cut some lanes in it. This creates some lanes to cast and it also gives the bass places to stage. I've seen it done many times on ponds when I was a kid. 

[LarrySTL]

If there is 3+ FOW under some of those pads, I'd also take a flipping stick with serious braid and something like a texas rigged plastic craw  with a strong hook, peg your weight, and pitch it into any hole in the pads or the spots where a fish missed your frog. Craws will hang up a lot less than worms or creature baits with long skinny appendages.  You'll know real soon if there are some bigger bass in there.

[tjm]

I fished ponds in RI like that for ~15 years, that the lilies never  seemed to get thicker  or spread.  That may a climate thing or species of pad thing or it could have been that the acid rain kept them in check.  Since that time housing and development choked some of those streams dry or filled them with grass.  I would cast onto the pad rather than the openings.  Anything that shook the pad then fell off the edge would take large mouth and any bait fish type lure retrieved parallel to the edge would take bass and chain pickerel.  In those ponds the crappie seemed to always be in the open water. Repeated wading through a patch seemed to keep a path open.