hi all,i need help with my 200acre pond,,,,its 70% common carp:(
i cant afford to kill off everything in the pond with chemicals so thats not an option. i have been catching and killing as many carp as possible. i was wondering if i had got thousands of blue gill (or some other fish) that they might out-compete the carp and drive their numbers down? for the last few years the bass and sunfish fishing has been horrible:( is there anything i can do to combat these friggin carp???? please help:)

Lets see, a 200 acre POND!!!???? That's a heck of a lake in my book!

Other than dropping the water level and hitting it with Rotenone, I don't have any good suggestions on eliminating the carp. You could try bowfishing, but that'll only reduce them, not eliminate them.

I'm sure the experts will chime in in a bit. My question to them is:

What would stocking 400 or more muskies do?

how clear is the water in your lake? My brother goes Bowfishing in our nearby lake and kills around 40 or 50 carp a night. He's got a 19 foot long by 9 foot wide custom built boat that has 18 500 watt halogen lights shining down into the water. He usally fills up a 55 gal drum most of the nights that he goes. might be worth a try if your water is very clear.

200 acre pond... WOW! I am sure some musky would do some hurtin! I'd gladly do all the bowfishing you need done and invite all my friends. I love carp fishing too... 70% carp is a mess though. What a shame... What is the rest of the fish population like?

Tell us more about the pond/lake.

the water is very clear. the coves have thick hydrilla and lilly pads. the main lake is a baron waste land ,due to the carp. not much cover in main body. ide say there is about 20 lm bass,,,1000 sunfish,,,500 mixed catfish and a dozen crappie left in the pond:(

aside from the 10000000000000000000000000 carp that is lol

Time to have some carp fishing tournaments! That could help a little in thinning your adult sized carp.

If you believe you only have about 20 LMB in the lake, you need to add more top line predators right away! I bet you have more than that though. In that size of a lake, if you only had 20 bass, I highly doubt you would have ever seen one. Carp young of year are excellent forage for predator fish. You should be able to grow out some monster predator fish, though recruitment for your predator fish will be quite low until they start reducing that carp population considerably. Carp really make spawns difficult for other fish.

The way I see it, you could add a massive amount of predators which should help thin your carp to a level that has little negative impact on the lake. Then, your NEW challenge will be trying to establish a strong forage bass, because you'll end up transitioning to a predator heavy lake... which will then need fixing.

i like your ideas weisguy!,,,i have been trying to recruit some big LMB. what do you guys think of using green sunfish/prech and pike to eat the carp???? p.s. i can get a ton of green sunfish and a few large LMB from a friends pond.

Depending on your budget, a large gill net would be the easiest way to remove large numbers of carp efficiently. Also, large fyke nets can have similar results. Large BOW like this require management methods beyond what a normal pond owner can usually afford...

can you please describe the 2 nets,and their use to me?

Gill nets are usually set perpendicular to shore. When fish swim along, they can swim into the net, their heads go through, but their body doesn't. They then try to back out and the net gets caught in their gills plates, and the fish are then caught...
Simple diagram and description

Where to buy one

Fyke nets are also set perpendicular to shore. Here, fish come to a blocking net, the fish cannot swim through it so they follow it, usually away from shore. There a funnel type netting system is. The fish follow into the funnel and then get trapped.

Diagram of different styles of fyke nets and a place to buy them.

thanks, do you use one? can i buy the $69 one? or do i need to spend $300

You will never be able to reduce the carp population by netting by yourself. You would work yourself to death, kind of like harvesting a 200 acre corn field by hand by yourself.

Stocking enough Muskies to make a difference would cost you a fortune (400 Tiger Muskies @ $15 each = alot of money) Then following up with 200 every 2-3 years to keep em going and always having smaller muskies to eat the smaller yoy carp.

Transporting bass and other fish from local ponds wont get you any results or fix the problem either. If budget is a concern, use what you have to make the most of the situation. maybe pick one spot that you enjoy to fish from and set up one fish feeder and feed some fish food everyday. You will congregate some gamefish in that area as well as tons of carp too, but they will be easy pickins when congregated to that spot. Sit out with a can of corn and catch trophy carp all day long and you will have more fun than you could ever dream possible. You could create a world class carp fishing zone!!! Then you could stock a couple hundred hybrid bluegill at that feeder if you want to raise some meat fish as well. They will outcompete the carp for the food!

Probably a $1000 investment in feeder and food and fish and you will not be fixing your lake, but adapting to your lake and will catch alot of fish and will wear out a few fishing poles!

Spent many of nights with gill nets in college trying to catch striped bass. Along with the striped bass we caught lots of other species with carp being one of them. There are many different sizes on mesh size, etc. on gill nets to limit the amount of by-catch and to target specific sizes of fish, you can even suspend them in the water column to increase catch rates, etc.. So if you go with the gill net method, you will catch some carp but remeber you will also catch many other fish that you do not want to. Also, if you do not check the nets every couple of hours you will have a lot of fish die since they will not be able to swim. Like Nate said, it is very labor intensive and you would never get rid of them with just gill nets.

Two fronts have to be addressed:

1) Trying to stop recruitment of new carp.

2) Getting rid of adult carp.

For item one, it seems like we have mild agreement that some kinds of predator fish are needed.

For item two, it seems like netting, trapping, fishing, and bow hunting are the options.

What is the water source for the pond? I'm asking because I wonder if you can easily draw down the lake. Then you might have less area to work with. I wouldn't want to draw down the lake if there was a chance it would not fill back up easily (ie/ no rain).

I would think fishing torny.A bunch of fishermen,the more the better,can do a kot of damage to a fish population pretty fast if they keep EVERY carp they catch.Run an ad if nessassary and get a crowd.Offer prizes.

I agree with what Nate has said above. It's going to be extremely difficult to control that amount of carp, but I do believe it's quite possible as long as you have a long term outlook. Unless you are prepared to spend a LOT of money, the key will be bringing the predator:prey balance back to a sane level.... over many years.

If your are SURE you have an extremely small predator population, I would be more inclined to add massive amounts of small LMB. They are pretty cheap, and they'll target carp YOY. My guess is you'd be looking at adding anywhere between 3,000-7,000!!! You could also add some HSB, NP, WE and SMB. They'll do a number on the carp YOY also, and will add variety for your own sake.

In my scenario (and contrary to Nates suggestion... which he knows a lot more than me!), assuming you stock a huge amount of LMB I would NOT feed initially. Bass from a hatchery will be pellet trained, which means they'll happily munch on pellets and will eat fewer young carp. Besides, why give carp an additional food source to thrive on? BUT, if you are going to target them heavily by rod and reel (meaning having LOTS and LOTS of people do so... not just you on the weekends), getting them piled up in a specific area would help that cause.

I would avoid green sunfish. In fact, I would wait to stock any additional forage fish until I had a pretty good feeling that the carp population was under control. I would have an annual shock survey done so I could have some data to compare year to year. You want the predators going after baby carp, not other forage. Greenies would target some of the small carp, but I think they'd add more problems than they removed. Frankly though, with a BOW the size of yours, some have probably found their way in already anyway from other BOW's upstream.

Down the road (when you get closer to a balance), you could look at adding all sorts of fun stuff (in advanced sizes). Bluegill, redear, pumpkinseed, rockbass, yellow perch, golden shiners, etc.

Here's a modification of a previous suggestion: stock muskie fingerlings. They cost a fraction of what the adults do, and as carp don't eat much in the way of fish, they would have a good chance of survival. Also, it's common for state game and fish agencies to stock fingerling fish even in lakes with significant predator populations, and have the new fish survive and establish; oftentimes we think we have to stock larger fish if there are already fish present, and while it is preferable, it isn't the only way; all fish born in the wild in any lake or stream start out as fry, and a fair number of them live every year. Muskie are far and away a more aggressive predator than bass, and they also grow several times larger and thus can eat larger carp; a forty-inch muskie could easily eat a fifteen-inch carp, and there are probably more carp that size in the lake than there are huge ones.

It would still be wise to fish out as many as possible of the larger ones in any way possible, but I'd bet a lot of money that some tiger or pure-strain muskie would put a hurting on those carp, and thin them by fifty percent or more within four or five years. Then once you get them thinned, you can stock more bass, and the bass will help in keeping down recruitment. But it does you no good at all to curb recruitment if you've still got thousands of adult carp in the lake.

What about starting a bowfishing tournament, and making it a weekly event? There's got to be some bowfishermen somewhere in the area that would love to get on that lake at night with a few spotlights.

Weissguy make a good point with the electrofishing boat. A few days of that could maybe bag hundreds of carp?

Any experts on that? Do the shock boats bring up the carp?

good ideas all! my lake is very shallow ( 5'avg and 12'max) i dont know if muskies/pike will live in the summer when the water temp reaches 83f?? will they? and where is a good place to purchase muskies/pike/lmb????

You can get carp electrofishing by the boat load when they are spawning! Otherwise it would depend on the depths of the lake. Even if you get them by the boat load, I still think that in 200 acres you are just harvesting a renewable resource that just wont end.

Walt, I would highly disagree with your theory of stocking small fish and their survival rate. If a lake or pond has a fish population established, most of the time you will spend more money stocking smaller fish than larger ones, and you will get a much better survival into adulthood by stocking less of the bigger fish. Lots of fish do indeed make it to adulthood by natural reproduction, but that is out of hundreds of thousands fry and fingerlings. If we were talking percentages, probably only 1% of fish hatched make it to adulthood. Especially Muskies, their fingerlings are so dumb that even when they are 12 inches long a bass can swim right up to them, open its mouth and have a nice skinny snack.

ps. i used to love the carp but i got REAL sick of them after not being able to catch more than 5 bass in the last 3 years! i looked at the bottom of the lake for days with "fish tv" and saw only 2 bass and no aquatic plants in the main body:(

question: can i just buy a few hundred 4" bass every year? will that at-least give me some keeper bass to catch each season??

Normally I would not recommend stocking fingerlings in a lake with an established population of fish, Nate - I agree with you a hundred percent on that. I made my suggestion based on Scott's assessment that carp make up 70% of the biomass of the lake; and now that he mentions that he saw only two bass in the main body of the lake over a two-day period with an underwater camera, it is probably safe to conclude that LMB have not successfully spawned in at least three or four years if not longer, and that there are not many left in the lake. The fact that carp don't eat fish to a significant extent, and they're the main fish present in the lake, makes it very reasonable to expect that a good percentage of muskie fingerlings would survive.

The other reason I made my suggestion was simply the cost factor, as a response intended to mitigate the potential problem you alluded to of how much 400 12" muskie would cost ($6000 to be exact, not including shipping or delivery).

To answer your question, Scott, the bass aren't going to do well until you get the carp under control, because carp outgrow the size at which bass can utilize them as prey, extremely quickly, and the bass are simply going to be starving until you get most of the carp out of there and replace them not just with bass but also (as you correctly surmised) bluegill or some other prey species that stays prey-size longer, for the bass to feed on.

I honestly think draining the lake is the only way to cure this. Controlling that large a number of carp is almost impossible.

There is a lake where I work that has no natural reproduction of musky but is maintained by stocking 6"-8" fingerling at 1 per 2 acres, every year. The lake has some excellent musky fishing and many bass in the 4 to 6 pound range...

Here's a link to a webpage for a muskie association in Washington state - halfway down the page it mentions that the Washington state department of fish and wildlife has stocked muskies several times to control rough fish, including one specific instance mentioned for carp (probably more than one instance was carp, but they specify one):

http://www.nwtigermuskies.com/faq.html

So again, what is the water source for the lake?

well it sounds like i am out of luck. i dont have much $. to spend on the pond,maybe $500 a year if i am lucky. there are blue gill and green sunfish in the pond,maybe i can try to stock a handful of lunker bass?

What is the water source?

its an old swamp fed by springs and a stream,,there are no carp in the stream,the carp wear put in it by man years ago.

I think I would start getting all of the predators in there that I could catch. They ought to at least start eating the smaller carp.

Lacking $, like most of us, I think I would start having all of the fishing derbies that I could.

Okay, a couple more ideas, Scott. (The thought of a 200-acre lake that can't be fixed is just more than my fishing brain can handle, so I'm pulling for you to get it fixed.) Neither of these may be the direction you want to go, but I'll throw them out:

1) What about contacting your state game and fish agency and telling them they can open up the lake to public fishing if they'll get it corrected? There are four lakes in my home county from twenty-something acres to over a hundred, that used to be owned by a chemical company but were turned over to TWRA several years ago to open to the public. There's a bait shop on the property now, and rental boats on each lake; people pay $5 to fish for a day. The lakes are never crowded. I looked online and RI's state game and fish agency has a program called "public/private partnership" and looks to be actively looking for more properties, though I don't know if that's just properties they can acquire (don't sell your lake!). They already have private individuals running some of their fishing properties, and they don't seem to have a lot of great properties judging from the ones they list as ones they want to develop, so perhaps they would consider leaving your property private (yours) and just opening it to fishing. Just a thought.

I don't know what fishing pressure is like in RI, or whether that's a direction you even want to consider. But if you did, and the game and fish agency were interested, they would have the resources to right the lake quickly. There's a good chance they would just poison it and start over with a fresh stocking. Within two or three years you'd have a completely new, balanced lake with the species you want.

2) Find a nearby muskie club (nearby may mean a neighboring state) and see if they would be interested in stocking the lake for you in exchange for fishing permission for the members of the club. Here's a link to an online article about a muskie club that spent $10,000 to stock 1,000 7-14" muskie from Minnesota Muskie Farm (which ships all over the U.S.) into a public lake:

http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:mf4O...n&ct=clnk&gl=us

Here's a link to a chapter of Muskies Inc. in NY. The organization's website makes it sound like they are really big into bringing muskie to new areas, and it also sounds like they do a lot of stocking; they're closer to you than the other muskie clubs I was able to find (though I only looked for a few minutes):

http://www.muskiesinc.org/Default.asp?area_2=MINC%20Pages/PublicChapter/ChapterInfo&CH=22

One last thought: stock however many muskie fingerlings you can afford each year for the next two years, then start stocking bass. Fingerlings are much cheaper than 12"; the MN hatchery's website is malfunctioning at the moment so I couldn't access their price list, but if I remember correctly you could get 200-400 fingerlings for $500. If even 50 survived, within a year they would make a very noticeable difference in the number of carp in the lake; if you stocked two years running, within four or five years you likely would no longer have a carp problem.

I'll desist now. I hope you find a way to right the lake!

Scott sorry I just saw this thread. We have encountered the same problem with "rough" fish. We were able to contact commercial fishermen in our area and they agreed to gill net rough fish out of the lakes for no cost (they got the fish they caught free). Carp , gar , buffalo , bowfin , and some catfish. We used to have fish drives. Put a gill net out across the lake (nets were maybe 500 ft in length) and start about 400 yards away with several boats banging the boat and dragging a chain and ropes to drive the fish into the net. Then the commercial fishermen would do the rest. They removed many boat loads of unwanted fish. I recall one gar was over 13 ft long.

thanks to all

ewest, a 13' gar? What did it weigh???

No weight. Its head was at the pickup tailgate and its tail on the front bumper.

Hi All. New member who just happened to stumble on this thread.

Carp fishing is a growing sport in the US now. I run several carp fishing message boards and anyone with a carp problem would be welcome to use those boards to meet fishermen who may be willing to help remove unwanted carp. Here in NC we have several hundred "pay ponds" that are stocked with carp, so it may be a chance to locate a few commercial fishermen also.

Naturally, out of respect to this board I will not post links, but if anyone is interested PM me.

It should be noted that in the UK fishermen pay exorbatant fees to fish for carp in lakes such as the one mentioned in this thread. Many of the carp fishermen in the US have UK links and are true sportsman. (not your steriotypical carp fishermen).

I'm sure that a few of these guys could put a hurt on the carp population.


Great site BTW.

T

buster, Welcome to pond boss forum, lots of great info, and some info you might not want to know.
Your right about carp fishing, they interviewed some contestants on the local channel in Watertown, and many had traveled from the UK for the big tournament on the ST. Lawrence.

Thanks for the welcome. I've been here before because I knew there was a wealth of info here about ponds, just never posted.

One of my boards runs a carp fishing tournament series at carp ponds in SC, NC, PA,Ohio and Indy. I'm sure that most of the readers here have never heard of a carp pond, but it is a a huge deal. I know that many of the pond owners could learn a lot from this board.

The other site caters to the Euro style wildwater fishermen. This is an international board and could very likely provide help anywhere in the country for carp removal. I have to admit that most of these fishermen are catch and release oriented, but I'm sure that they could still provide a service. JMHO--If I owned a lare pond that had a carp problem, I would look at selective removal. Get rid of the runts and promote the growth of trophy size fish. That approach helps deal with the overpopulation of carp, but leaves some huge fish that can provide great sport.

BTW--I am not a "carp hugger". I just realize that you can't complete rid a lake of them. If you do they will eventually come back. The best approach for a lake owner might be to control them, but still utilize them.

JMHO
T

Welcome, buster, thanks for posting and for the great ideas.



No one will accuse you of being a carp hugger, and even if they did, you'd still be welcome--we even tolerate our "Green Sunfish Huggers" with patience and understanding.

Welcome Buster! Every year they usually have a carp fishing tournament on the Potomac River in Washington DC. Guys from all over the world come out for it. The techniques and equipment used is nothing short of amazing. They take their fishing more serious than guys fishing in a B.A.S.S tournament! I personally wouldn't want carp in a small pond, but as you said if managed, they certainly can provide some hard tugging fun!

Yolk, I'm with ya on the GSF Huggers----PU!

You guys had better head to the deep woods, wear camo and be real still. Sooner or later, JHAP will return and you will find out what happens to those who tug on Supermans cape and spit into the wind.

DIED, please tell the mechanic to dust off the Deathstar, I can see that I have my work cut out for me.

Give this one time to finish before cutting off his breathing with your mind, will ya?