Sounds like a tough mix of very limited budget, and non aligning goals for all members. Biggest bang for your buck sounds like the feeding the BG as you will touch more fish with fish food (growing them faster in lower productivity water than stocking and limited amount of forage annually) and hopefully increasing the numbers that can spawn.
------Pick a small zone of the water and maximize it with habitat and feeding. It doesn't have to be unsightly in any way. May be able to reach out to one of the local fisheries biologists with the Fish and Wildlife department for some tips or planning to put everybody down the path of we're doing this to both naturally stimulate the environment aesthetically (ie...make it pretty to look at) and at the same time be good stewards of the lake/fish to give them what they need.
Fish Feeder $1,200-2,500
Quality Fish Food ranges from $50-70 per 40lb bag. Quantity discounts are available at some of the suppliers.
If that's not an option the introduction of GSH as a replacement to FHM in your stocking budget. Not sure if it really helps your situation though. That list of existing forage fish in the lake is pretty extensive already.
If it was me, I'd try to pool some funds for the guys that like to fish in the lake, ask for permission to set a floating or bank feeder that would take almost zero room out of the 27 acres, use the fish stocking budget on fish food and keep moving forward on the trees/habitat and cull every bass in the lake until I was seeing improvement on forage response and RW of the fish.
- If you have eaten holes in your forage the larger bass are forced to eat smaller and smaller fish. As a consequence of this they suffer trying to maintain weight let alone gain any. This also puts more pressure on the smaller LMB as they too can't find enough food as the forage is now being double and triple dipped.
Water fertility improves / increases carry capacity
Feeding the fish improves / increases the carry capacity
-----If you think about this for a minute. Tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people feed their fish with auto feeders around the world. It's easier than annually stocking and likely a more effective way to grow bigger/more fish or most of them would be annually stocking additional forage. Additional annual stocking is a way to give a short term boost in available food, introduce a new/desired species or correct a missing species due to mortality (eaten or fish kill)
Habitat / Hiding spots increases the carry capacity
Additional forage stocking increases the carry capacity as long as they stay in the water and not in a fishes belly
If you are finding that your fish are lower than you would like on RW (sounds like you have)....they have overeaten the carry capacity of the water and the only two ways, I'm aware of, to change that is by restoring the natural balance (culling) of the lake to what it can provide naturally or increasing the food available to the fish.
If I'm off here fellas please don't hesitate to correct me. I am still a guppy in the world of pond management and try to learn more about it everyday.
Totally jealous of getting the opportunity to help manage a 27 acre BOW. Very challenging path to thread the needle on when not all people involved have the same goals.
