Bruce,

Sorry to hear about that. I am constantly battling Chara up to three feet thick in my ponds. Been removing one wheel barrow load a day out of the trout pond and two out of the perch pond. The main pond has so much I will be draining it this fall and starting over after recovering and temporarily moving or harvesting as many fish as possible.

One day I took out several wheel barrow loads out of the trout pond and really stirred up the bottom. Had a couple of floater browns the next day. Not sure if it was due to bringing up some oxygen eating hydrogen sulfide or muck, stressing them by throwing in the rake over and over again, or the fact that I forgot to turn on the diffuser that evening. Could have been all of the above. (See I'm learning by the school of hard knocks too!)

Once again sorry to hear about your partial fish kill. I guess I've been lucky so far as I'm sure not that smart.

If pigs could fly bacon would be harder to come by and there would be a lot of damaged trees.