Thanks for the responses. Behind my house I have a pretty good habitat setup with 75 feet of shoreline with vegetation and lots of branches, broken pots, cinder blocks, pallets, tree branches, old fence posts, old metal fence posts, Christmas trees and other stuff. Typically it will hold good numbers of forage as well as bass. I will throw food when I see them there but we also have turtles and muscovies. If we had a feeder, we would just attract muscovies and turtles unless someone was constantly there to monitor it. We have enough budget to probably dump 5,000 pounds of fish food in the lake if we had no forage fish. That would be 13.7 pounds per day. If we did that, I would guess 90% of it would be not be eaten by fish and we would go from having 10 muscovies to 50 muscovies or more on the lake and a healthier turtle population. So, call it 500 pounds getting to a fish to eat. For the same amount of money, we can get an actual 500 pounds of forage fish into the lake and hope some of them keep growing and that some residents will spend $50 on a 50lb bag of food and maybe we can get a few hundred pounds of food into the fish. I also did locate the golden shiners so that will be on the list for next year. There is currently also a big bloom of nitella (I think that's what it is) so in shallower water there is a lot of weed for the fish to hide in and I would assume the tilapia would devour it as well.
27 acres of deep water with steep sides is definitely an interesting animal to figure out for sure. Also, I would like to add that we did not have Florida strain fish originally stocked in the lake. I know many other folks are stocking only Florida or F-1 bass. We do not have that.
The plan going into next year will be selective harvest small bass, add more structure and habitat as we can, encourage folks to feed the fish (even if it is just a handful a day for a few houses) and add more forage fish. We shall see where it goes.....
