Per Bruce's request....
To save myself retyping this I will Copy and Paste my email to Bruce and Shorty. Obviously, some of this is not pertinent to the seine discussion. NEfish is Blake,and hopefully he will add or subtract from this short story (and hopefully add some pictures)...........
What a day of seining!!! I am sure I will forget some details but here is my short story of how our virgin seining voyage went..........
My friend Blake and I decided Saturday night to meet up and do a little seining around noon on Sunday. We also ran into my old roommate who agreed to meet us. Thankfully, Blake brought his fiance, sister, brother-in-law and all of their kids (about 6 kids). We ended up with about 5 guys and 3 women and the kids to do the seining. Luckily we had that many people, because we ended up using ALL of them. We decided to start with the east arm of my pond, which is roughly 150' wide where we started and seined to the north inlet, which was about 200 yds. long. When we pulled up to the cove we spotted about five 'pods' of carp with 10-20 fish in each pod. We knew we may catch a few. Blake and I spanned the pond fine but once we started pulling the mud began to gather in the net and we had to get 2 guys on each side to pull. We got the net within feet of the pods of carp and corraled them. The water was no more than 3 ft. deep throughout the seining process. By the time we got 100 yds into the seining we began to wear down and had 3 guys on each side. We began to feel fish bump into our legs, escaping out the sides. This is when the kids got put to use. We put them on each side of the net to 'herd' the fish. It worked! And they had a blast. As we got to the north end it was all we could do to pull it with 6 guys. The mud was piling up. In fact there were so many fish and so much mud that the water on the side of the net we were pulling towards was 4-6" higher that the lake itself!! It was like a miniature tsunami moving through the water. Fish boiling everywhere! Once we pulled the net up on to shore we just looked in amazement. We had close to 1000 fish averaging at about .5 lbs of which 200-400 were carp. I may still take a count on those #'s to get a good idea of how many carp there were. Totals were 200-400 carp (2lb avg), 200-400 catfish (.5-1 lb avg), 100+ 4-6" crappie, 2 bullhead, 2 largemouth, 1 green sungish and 4 bluegill. The idiot that I am, I didn't plan for this. We literally had a 'pile' of fish laying there on the shore. With deep water 150 feet away. I hollered at my wife to go get buckets but she didn't want to. We all started grabbing as many crappie as we could and hauling them back to the lake. We lost 30% of them. I didn't expect to see that many crappie and I didn't expect to be in such shallow water when we got them to shore. I left all of the carp and catfish laying. My poor uncle's house is only 100 yds away from the pile of fish. haha I may have to go get the loader and haul dead fish tonight.
The rest of the day we seined the body of the lake with 3 guys and a boat pulling on one side and a 4 wheeler on the other side. We caught several hundred fish (including 6lb. and 8lb. cats) but had no where close to what we caught that first haul.
When it was all said and done blake and I walked back to the east arm of the pond and looked at the water. Both of us remarked that we thought the water clarity had tripled since that morning in that arm of the pond. Maybe we had drank too many beers
Unbelievable experience!! I am sure I will think of more details, but thought this may interest you.
BTW, my horizontal aeration and BoJo buglight should be installed by the end of the week. You are more than welcome to come down anytime.
PS There wasn't a single tear in the net after we were done. I was amazed. Every other time I have seined, we have had slight tears in the net. That thing is tough. The only thing I am a little worried about is mice in my shop. I am trying to remedy that.
