POA’s homegrown fish
When Rick Echols took the job as Lakes and Fisheries superintendent, the POA was stocking several different kinds of fish for the seven man-made lakes in Bella Vista. Four years ago, he started a fish hatchery project that will help stock the lakes at little cost to the POA.
It starts in early spring in the heated fishing dock on Lake Avalon. With a little help from the POA staff, this year over a million saugeye were hatched. Most won’t survive, Echols said.
There are four golf course ponds on Berksdale that have become fish nurseries. Each year, they are drained and refilled before the fry are moved from Lake Avalon. This year, there were so many fry that about 225,000 were placed directly into Lake Avalon and Lake Ann. They may not survive, Echols said. The rest are growing in the four Berksdale ponds.
In the past, the project has been derailed by flooding. When Little Sugar
Creek floods, it overruns the ponds and some of the fish in the creek will feast on the saugeye fry. Some of the fry will be washed out of the ponds but won’t last long in the creek.
Echols and his staff have tried other types of fish. Last year, he had blue cats in the pond when a fall flood took most of them. He’s also raised crappie in the ponds, but there isn’t as much of a need this year. Since the project is so low cost, the failed attempts don’t bother him very much.
The only fish he plans to buy this year are the trout that are stocked in Lake Brittany every winter. Few trout will survive the warm waters of summer. In the past, the POA has received some extra fish from the state Fish and Game Division. But since the POA is private, the state will only provide fish that no one else wants and he doesn’t expect to get any this year. But that’s OK, he said. The fisheries are healthy enough to reproduce on their own with only a little help from his staff.