Good Day,

We have just finished constructing a 12 hectare dam on our farm in South Africa. Our intention for the dam is purely recreational and we only want to stock the dam with trout. The dam finished being built a month ago and has just finished filling up. We have not stocked any trout in the dam yet. The other afternoon we saw a wake in the dam which we could only imagine it was a bass. It must have come from a dam down-stream from us. This for us is a disaster. My father is so upset he wants to empty the dam and start again. I mentioned to him that i have seen guys in the states shocking fish. The dam in some places is about 6 meters deep. We cannot get commercial fish shockers here and to import them is a complete hassle and with the Dollar/Rand exchange rate close on 13 to 1 it will be very expensive for us. Could we make a fish shocker using a 220v generator or a 12v battery. I have read a few previous blogs but came out just as confused as i went in. How can i go about making my own shocker. I am not to worried if fish die in the process as there should not be any fish in the dam anyway. Bass are also an invasive fish pieces in our waters.

Any help or advice would be much appreciated.

A few things you might consider before emptying the BOW. First, shocking can be very dangerous for amateurs! Besides, you are by no means assured of stunning the older, deeper fish.

Second, would it make more sense to poison the water? That would kill the fish but leave the water there. The poison dissipates in a couple of weeks.

Third, if it happened once, it will happen again. You may wish to examine ways to prevent the bass from entering the pond before poisoning, or it might be a losing battle.

Like Anthropic said, if it happens once it can happen again. Make that desicion and go from there

Hi Anthropic,

Thank you for your input. We think the bass may have got into the dam during the building stage, before we had installed our monks weir.

I understand that shocking may be dangerous, but if we did it i think we will get an electrician to put it together for with safety switches and measures in place. I will just need to give him a design and a rough idea of what we need. We know where all of the deep channels are and we have a depth sounder on our boat, If we did go the shocking way could we reach with effect lets say 5 meter deep water?

How do you go about poisoning a dam? What chemicals do you use and what is the active ingredients.

One hectare is about 2.5 acres. Right?

Electro fishing isn't going to be all that effective on a body of water that size. It is only good for sampling. I doubt that you would be lucky enough to get the probes to catch anything.

I think you will have to drain it and start over. If you're seeing bass, other unwanted fish are probably also there.

You could try a seine net test to see what you come up with first. Then decide. You could also try a gill net and drive fish into them and check the results.