GROUND ZERO:
LAKE BARKLEY
“If there’s a chance to stop these
fish, we’re going to find out on this lake.”
Those are the words of Freeman, a 24-
year-old Eddyville, Ky., native who has
spent his entire life on Kentucky Lake and
Lake Barkley. In the beginning, it was fish-
ing for bream, bass and catfish with fami-
ly members. Then, it was guiding for crap-
pie and bass for spending money.
Now, it’s pulling thousands of
pounds of Asian carp from the lake
every day. And it’s personal.
“It’s personal to me,” he says. “It’s
like somebody breaking into your home
and ruining everything.”
Freeman, who fished on Murray
State’s bass fishing team en route to a
civil engineering degree, is a bass fish-
erman at heart. He won the 2020 The
Bass Federation (TBF) National
Championship in March, and like so
many others, it was Kentucky and
Barkley that nurtured his passion for
the sport. It’s for that reason that
Freeman decided to eschew his
degree – for now, anyway – to take up
arms against the carp invasion.
Equipped with a fleet of six boats,
seven employees and thousands of feet
of gill nets, Freeman takes to the water
as often as he can to chip away at the
problem that just won’t go away.
BY THE NUMBERS
Freeman is a commercial carp fisher-
man, who also contracts with the state
of Kentucky to harvest Asian carp from
the Ohio River and other waterways
affected by the carp crisis. When he’s
not doing contract work – or spending
rare free time bass fishing – he’s spend-
ing most of his time on Lake Barkley,
which Freeman points to as the true
hotbed of big Asian carp inundating two
of the South’s best bass lakes.
His best monthly harvest was
218,000 pounds of carp – or 109 tons of
biomass. In one day alone, Freeman
and his crew once harvested 21,000
pounds. The truly shocking thing is
that two or three days after they har-
vest their fish, the spots at which they
harvest replenish with entirely new
groups of carp.
Despite making money from har-
vesting and selling his catches,
38
Lance Freeman, 24, operates a
commercial fishing business
that specializes in netting
invasive Asian carp.
Freeman would prefer never having to
spend another day dropping and
pulling in gill nets filled with thousands
of pounds of fish. He’d prefer the sup-
ply run dry altogether.
It’s not as if commercial carp fishing
isn’t profitable. Freeman often receives
a base of 8 to 16 cents per pound at
the market along with subsidies from
the Kentucky Department of Fish and
Wildlife that wants Asian carp removed
from local waterways. It’s far from
nothing considering 15,000 pounds is a
fairly average day.
But it’s not all about the money for
Freeman. He could be doing so many
other things with a college degree and
a penchant for catching bass. If the
well were to run dry, he’d be more than
happy about it.
FINDING FISH
“It’s a whole lot different than bass
fishing, that’s for sure,” Freeman says
of chasing after Asian carp. “These
things are 10 times more adaptive than
anything else.”
And therein lies one of the biggest
problems when dissecting the impact of
Asian carp. It’s not just the sheer num-
bers, which can’t be understated, but
also the fact that the fish seem to be as
intelligent and adaptable as any species
Freeman has ever encountered.
Freeman’s process for finding and
harvesting schools of carp starts with
side-imaging in well-known bays and
on points where they regularly find
huge schools of fish. From there, he
and his crew – it often takes multiple
boats to successfully wrangle a school
– use their motors to get the school
riled up and the carp moving closer
together. The nets come out, and that’s
when the fun begins.
“It’s like herding cattle,” Freeman
says. “The biggest thing is speed. You’ve
got to be quick to get around them.
They know exactly what’s going on.”
Riding around, toward and over
their nets, Freeman and his crew corral
the fish and use the acoustic disruption
of their motors to coerce the carp into
swimming toward the trap. Asian carp,
and in particular silver carp, which
FLWFISHING.COM | MAJORLEAGUEFISHING.COM | APRIL-MAY 2020