Dave,
Thanks for the info!
I'm not going to stock Grass carp or Tilapia until I have a summer under my belt and understand what weeds/FA I'm going to have to deal with. Right now, I don't have a real problem with either one. I have about 100sq2 of light pond scum total on my pond, so it's barely anything. I was really expecting much more FA and weeds than I currently have. Maybe as the summer wears on, I’ll start seeing a problem.
The actual size of the pond at spillway level is .382 acres (I finally put some of that Calculus III and other math minor classes to work!). At normal pool, the pond is .355 acres in size. Assuming we get the same drought as last year (worst in 50 years I heard on the news the other day), then my pond should drop 7-8' from normal pool based on my neighbors ponds during the last two years. So, I'll end up with a surface area in the neighborhood of the .21-.25 acre range. It's hard to measure when the pond is full, so I'm going off some slope assumptions and excluding my built in shallow area that should go completely dry for my 'drought' size. I had the pond dug extra deep in the main area of the pond as a 'reserve water hole' in case of drought. I talked to my two neighbors who have ponds of similar size, and for the last 30 years, excluding the last two years of drought, their ponds have only dropped 2-3 feet in the middle of a normal summer.
I also realized last week that I messed up on the size of my watershed. I calculated it using the topographical maps from NTCOG (www.dfwmaps.com). This site will allow you to draw on the satellite view with the topographical lines overlaid and it'll tell you the size of the area that you just drew. That map, along with Pub. 590 gave me the size in acre feet that my pond should be. However, I stopped drawing when I hit a road not far away, since I thought it diverted water away from my watershed into a different area. However, I happened to drive over there the other day during a rain storm and realized that it's diverting water into my watershed. After recalculating my watershed, I now have 2.5 times the watershed that my pond needs. This explains even more why I've been having a small river of water over my spillway during the recent heavy rains and why the pond went from completely empty to full in 4 days (even given the crazy amount of rain we've been having)! Oh well, I guess it's better to err' on the side of too much watershed, than too little, even though I would have rather had a larger pond.
I may have to change my stocking strategy just a bit. I was out at the property the other day (it’s like a curse, every day that I’m not flying around the country/world for work, I have to go out to the pond and peer into the water), I noticed some fish that looked odd. They were 3-4” long with a black stripe down the side, black tipped tail, and very, very quick. They were ‘rounding’ up the fry against the shore and then one by one, they would dart up and grab a little fry. After checking some of the photos on this board and other web sites, I think they are young Bass of some sort. I tried catching one last weekend to verify, but they kept eluding me. Since it appears that they are decimating my fry population (not much vegetation for protection), I may have to accelerate my plans to get some BG in to the pond along with a few more pounds of FH’s.
