I think a pond is broken.

[Ray Russell]

So my buddy and I fish during lunch Monday to Friday and we try to find good spots.  We went to a park pond a few times that has a lot of bass, ducks, turtles, and nutria rats.  People go their for lunch and sit on the benches feeding the ducks and rats, fish for tilapia to get them out of the pond, walk and run around the park, and just enjoy the quiet scenery away from the turmoil of Houston.  The problem that we are having is that we haven't caught a single fish out of the pond, not 1 bite from a bass moving our lures out of the bed, nothing.  You can walk along the edge of the pond and spook bass out of their beds, some of them are so shallow that the dorsal fins are out of the water.  The bass will school together in groups of 10-20 and just swim along until you leave then they'll return to their beds.  You can drop a lure right into their bed and they'll swim away until you retrieve the lure and then they're back.  There doesn't seem to be any aggression with these fish.  We tried switching up colors, going from crank and jerk to jigs and rubber, nothing.  We are somewhat concerned that due to people feeding animals in the park it has somehow made the fish in the pond act "abnormal" when it comes to lures.  

 

We are going to wait and see what happens after spawning season but I was just wanting input on what to try or if we should just wait.  We've just never seen bass so not aggressive before.

[NittyGrittyBoy]

Time of the year they get picky. Keep changing presentations 

[Ray Russell]

3 minutes ago, NittyGrittyBoy said:

Time of the year they get picky. Keep changing presentations 

Today I should be getting those Doomzday turtles, going to see how they react to those.  Unfortunately due to the ground cover on the bottom using anything with treble hooks is very tricky.

[N Florida Mike]

Feeding rats? Think I’d stay away from there anyway...

[Ray Russell]

21 minutes ago, N Florida Mike said:

Feeding rats? Think I’d stay away from there anyway...

Nutria rats.  About the size of a beaver with the head and body of a beaver and the tail of a rat.

[ike8120]

When I went to school in Texas there was a bounty on Nutria. is that still true?

[scaleface]

I dont use weightless soft plastics much but do so in matted vegetation . Looks  like a place to use my favorite the Yum Swurm .  

[Koz]

Run a buzzbait over the top of them. Sexy Shad color gets their attention in my neck of the woods. Trust me on this.

[MGF]

Maybe you're too close and spooking them? What if you backed way off and made long casts to get to them?

[scaleface]

19 minutes ago, MGF said:

Maybe you're too close and spooking them? What if you backed way off and made long casts to get to them?

Try not to let the bass see you . Public park surely gets a ton of pressure . Go on windy days  , or even night . Stay low , be stealthy  and fish for the ones you cant see . 

[Hi-Powered Red Neck]

Bass in public park see tons of fishing pressure. Most have been hooked enough to learn to stay away from artificial lures. My backyard pond is the same way now that I've got them trained. Try fishing at night as scaleface suggested.

[HenryPF]

Check out TB's video on it.

 

Kinda eye opening

[WRB]

Are you sure you are seeing bass and not carp? Bass have a very distinct black stripe running down the lateral line and visible in the water. Male bass, the small size bass,  don't swim off the bed sites only a female tends to do that and spawners are not in larger numbers in groups as you discribe, carp are.

Tom

[Born 2 fish]

Weightless super fluke Texas Rig.

[N Florida Mike]

19 hours ago, Ray Russell said:

Nutria rats.  About the size of a beaver with the head and body of a beaver and the tail of a rat.

I trap em out of my lake because They eat my bank away. These  only are out at night and dusk. Very shy .

As far as the fishing , I’d try a 4 inch senko or zoom super fluke . I Texas rig them weightless. If they don’t bite them I’d try another lake!

[J Francho]

14 hours ago, HenryPF said:

Check out TB's video on it.

 

Kinda eye opening

How not to bed fish should be the title.

 

Paul's @Paul Roberts videos are much better at documenting and discussing bass behavior.

 

 

[Paul Roberts]

If they are leaving the beds when you cast, my first guess is that they have not received eggs yet. When they do, they'll likely stay put. They get progressively more aggressive as the brood develops. 

 

Fishing pressure is another likely issue. It shouldn't make them entirely uncatchable though, unless you are clunky about it. As suggested above, don't let them see you. Mark a target fish, then get out of sight for a good 10minutes. Sneak back and cast, without them knowing you are there. Cast beyond and to one side so that your cast doesn't alarm them. I like weightless, or lightly weighted soft plastics for a lot of my sight-fishing: worms, tubes mostly. One really deadly technique is to swim a swimming worm (ribbon-tail) slowly above the fish. Everyone lets it fall to the bottom and fish get jaded to that.

 

I personally don't fish to males. But I will fish to females. So I like to ID what's going on at the site, then back off and make an approach plan.

 

Hope this helps.

[J Francho]

High pressure and high traffic are two different things.  Fish where people seldom fish, but walk, and I find the fish don't take much notice of people on shore.

[Glaucus]

What I'm about to say, I say with God as my witness. It is the most astonishing thing I've ever seen and proves that fish are far more intelligent than we believe. You can train and condition them.

 

There is a pond I used to like to fish, but it was TOUGH. As I'm fishing it one of the locals, whom I actually count as a friend, came to the park with his child. He asked if I wanted to see something cool. Well of course I do! He breaks out the package of hotdogs, slaps the surface of the water and wiggles it around, and a bass CAME UP AND LIGHTLY TOOK THE WHOLE THING FROM HIM AND SWAM OFF! He said they do it all the time.

 

No wonder it was barely fishable. I've never gone back. It's a waste of time. Those fish don't care about lures. They take hotdogs from people like they're dogs.

[J Francho]

Conditioning and intelligence aren't really the same thing.  You can train a guppy to do the same thing.  Next time, fish with a hot dog.  This is the reason Berkley Trout Dough works on stockie trout - it's almost the same as the chow they feed them in the grow out runs.

[Ratherbfishing]

My advice is two-fold (sort of):  Either leave (until they fish aren't exhibiting this behavior) OR fish for bass you cannot see (probably not very many).  I've fished long enough to know that bass that are cruising around like they don't have a care in the world are VERY hard to catch.  

[WRB]

Bass in ponds rarely swim in groups of 10 to 20 fish, that would be a big % of the adult size bass population. If a male has made a bed he isn't going to spool off and abandon it in a pond with people walking around all the time. The male almost always swims a few feet away and circles back within a few minutes to guard his territory even before a female has laid eggs. The op describes Carp behavior, not LMB in a pond.

Tom

[RoLo]

Owing to territorialism, bass beds are rarely less than 20 feet apart.

In addition, carp frequently enter water so shallow that their dorsal fin may break the surface.

Nutria and carp both prefer sedentary water, which I envision this pond to be. 

I'd be remiss not to add, I've been fooled by carp more than once ? 

 

Roger

[NYWayfarer]

I have a similar pond in my neighborhood. It is one of the first places I hit ice out as it is the only place to catch a fish in March and April for a bank angler here. 
 

I can usually catch on of those bedding Bass on a wacky rigged 3” Yum Dinger. If you shake them just right they get Bass blood boiling! Never fails to elicit a strike sooner rather than later.