Flat Top Structure service is a new service provided by Flat Top Boats. With over seventeen years' experience in lake structure management, we take older lakes and bring them back to life. Each lake is very different, and we will carefully evaluate your lake and develop a specific plan for its restoration. We will assess the layout and current fish holding areas in your lake and come up with a plan to make your lake it's most productive.
One of the most important places in your lake is the shore line, 1' to 4' feet is where most of the fry hatch after a spawn. Too much bare bank area will lower the survival rate of your fry. We will build structure where the fry can live and grow, and it gives your bass places to hang out to ambush bait fish. The other areas are 4' to 8', and then 10' and deeper. If you have deeper water like I do up to 30', then we will look at the deepest part of your lake for winter time structure. There is a difference between summertime and wintertime structure. During the summer most lakes in the south stratify during the hot months of summer with cooler, lower-oxygenated water being around 12' to the bottom, but this varies from lake to lake this is called the thermocline. During the colder months the lake will turn over and the lake will stabilize and the fish will use all the water depths.
If you have, or live on a lake that is 20 years or older, then it probably needs new structure added to some areas. The ideal situation is to have more structure in your lake than you can fish in a half-day or full day of fishing. This will spread the fish out and will also raise the carrying capacity of your lake. If your lake has only a few structures, then your fish will be mostly concentrated in these areas.
On one of my customer's 40 acre lake we installed 114 structures that included a mix of natural cover and MOSS BACK FISH ATTRACTORS. We built 52 shoreline structures and the rest we put in 7 to 14'. We also did a structure job on a 5 acre lake where we added 48 structures from around the bank to out to 12'. We caught bass out of shoreline cover 2 days after we put the structure in the lake. The lake was shocked and the cover was full of bream and shad. If you have shad in your lake this cover will give your shad more places to spawn and in return will help maintain your shad population. We added structure to a 30 acre lake that included 75 pieces of both shoreline and off shore cover. More recently to this lake we added 11 rock piles, 35 more shoreline, and 49 more offshore structures for a total of 167 structures. This will give you more places to fish than they can fish in a day. Why do you want more places than you can fish in a day? It takes the pressure off your bass because you can only catch the same fish but so many times. Yes, you can catch the same fish more often than you think. We clipped the left pelvic fin on 145 bass last year in three different lakes, a 20 acre lake (the one I live on), a 30, and a 40 acre lake and we caught 82 of these fish again.
These are just a few of the examples of what we can do to increase the structure and cover in your lake. This gives everyone great places to fish and your buddy can't "front end" you. There are more benefits in having cover than not. You might get hung up sometimes but you know the old saying, "if you're not getting hung up every now and then you're not fishing where the fish are." The only thing bare banks and mud bottoms are good for are catfish ponds.
We can build natural cover off your property (if available), from the end of October through the first of March, and we are also a retailer and installer of the MOSS BACK FISH ATTRACTORS. I carefully plan and personalize each structure job as if it were my own. Give us a call at (256) 249-2821 and we can come up with a specialized plan to bring your lake back to life.
Mike Cleveland
FLAT TOP BOATS INC.
