If you feel compelled to harvest, then culling bass 12" and under is a safe recommendation. That means you harvest the youngest fish. In order to come up with a confident recommendation, you need data. When you say, "...recovering nicely..." what does that mean? You refer to your fish kill as "several years ago..." If you've had excellent recruitment of bass over the last two years, I'd be culling two year old bass. Since you're allowing harvest of bluegill, that could suggest recruitment of bass may not be high. If it were my pond, with such a helpful neighbor, I'd ask him to weigh and measure some fish, look at relative weights and then decide what your slot limit should be. I wouldn't guess at it, especially since your goal is trophy bass.
