I'd like to interject a personal opinion here.

I think that structure, in the form of trees is overrated as a means to grow more fish, or bigger fish.

Think of your invertebrate population in the same terms as your fish population. In order to grow and multiply, invertebrates need a substrate and food. Structure doesn't increase the fertility of the water (well, maybe a teeny-tiny bit), so that leaves substrate. All substrate is is surface area on which to live and ambush prey. If you look at the surface area created by putting fake trees and sticks in your pond, it's really minor compared to a good macrophytic plant community. In other words, you may be creating more work for yourself than it's worth. And that's work in terms of creating the structure, and then attempting to fish around it. I think that the best purpose of structure is to concentrate your fish for angling opportunity. If that's the case, I would think that in a 3/4 acre pond you'd want to have three, maybe four areas of structure. Any more than that and you're actually spreading the fish out, hence making them more difficult to catch. In your case, you don't want tons of areas for smaller fish to hide, since you're trying to grow trophy RES and BC, because that just creates more competition for your adult fish.

Just an opinion......


Holding a redear sunfish is like running with scissors.