Pond Boss Forums FISH & FISHING Show off your catch first nice sized lmb

have been culling fish pretty aggressively for the past year or so, biggest fish last year wasn't huge around 4 pounds and super skinny at 22 inches. have fished the pond twice this year, not seeing a lot of sunfish, most of em are either little or in that 3-5 inch range. still catching most bass in the 11-13 inch ranch and weighing between .65 and 1.25 pounds, might just be that water is still pretty cold here in Kansas. but yeah, first fatty this year. right at 17 inches, 4.65 pounds

Sounds like you're making good progress--great when a plan starts to come together.....
How big is the pond, and how many bass did you cull last year?

hard to say exactly, shoulda kept more detailed numbers. last year id say about 50, as far as size of the pond, really no idea lol. grandpa says 3, if I did my math right which im usually good at id say closer to 5 or 6 acres. probably pulled out closer to 75 bass in 2014 the first year that pond has ever been managed in 3 decades. caught lots of stunted bass that year. caught 20 inch bass that weighed less than 4 pounds. used to have cc but they have disappeared. not exactly sure what the sunfish species is, they look weird out there, sometimes they are kinda pink in color. I feel like I have kind of a unique setup, its an old rock quarry with a little island and peninsula in it, a deep side and a shallow side. struggling with what I should do though because im super new at all this as far as practical experience. anyone got any ideas?

heres the pond. long straight side is just over 800 ft long, south cliff is about 270ft. math comes out at 5.5 acres with those numbers

Looks nice
Start reading these threads and ask questions and in time things fall into line.... Somewhat. Sounds like you need to remove some bass and plant some more forage in there to help with the skinny bass

Use this: http://acme.com/planimeter/

Find the pond and measure it. That will end any questions as to the size!!

Likely single most important thing you can do is to remove as many LMB as you possibly can--WAG somewhere in the several hundred range, at least until those remaining start to fatten up.
Close second and third--grow forage base through feeding of lepomis species, and stocking of lepomids of a size that won't become immediate snacks for your LMB. That means putting fish in the 6-8 inch range at the least. There is debate about introducing sunfish caught in other waters to a pond due to concerns about spreading disease, though I cannot recall any of our members citing specific negative experiences. Maybe those with more experience, such as Bill Cody or Essup, will chime in on this issue. IMHO, removing several hundred bass this spring/summer and adding a couple hundred large BG would give you the biggest jump on improving the fishery.

No first hand problem with disease, but I did transfer 200 adult Golden Shiners from a local public BOW that had Eurasian Watermilfoil. I made sure that no water from that BOW entered my pond and I still had EWM show up the next year.

Maybe the GSH ate seeds and pooped them out?

BUT, any external parasites could be transferred on incoming fish, and a salt dip will cure that.

ill definitely keep taking out a lot of the smaller/ skinny fish. i just worry that maybe its not too many bass at all and its just all not enough food. if i cull too many fish would it have an adverse affect down the roads like in a few years time? is that even a thing lol, to take out too many bass?

"Too many bass" and "not enough food" are, in most ponds, different expressions of the same idea. Every pond is a little different, and no generalization applies universally, but most would agree that removing every skinny bass you catch, and probably all fish below a certain length, is probably not going to have any adverse effects--keep going until you see them fattening up.

I remove 150-250 annually from a 3 acre pond, and it's really just barely enough.

Correct. There is no way (unless you had very deep pockets AND you had a huge filtration system for the pond water) that you can add enough forage fish for the LMB. Each LMB will eat 10# of fish to gain one pound in weight (as a generality). So, lets do some math.

If a pond that is not aerated and there isn't supplemental feeding going on (i.e. fish pellets) it can support roughly 300 pounds of fish per surface acre. So, lets say ALL your LMB are 1#, and 75% of the fish population is LMB. In a 3 acre lake that means 225# of LMB. Now you would have to add 2,250 pounds of forage fish to get all those bass from 1 pound to 2 pounds. BUT, since the carrying capacity of the pond is only 900 pounds, what are you going to do to keep the water quality up and the fish from croaking from low oxygen levels? Plus, you'd have to stock more than that actual number due to natural mortality, etc.

So, the answer is take out a lot of bass.

went fishing again today and caught lots of 12 inch or so fish, so should I just start culling anything under 13? and on another note, what about the larger bass I do catch. 2 fish were caught today at just above 2 pounds one was 16.5 the other 17 inches. first big fish this year was that length and twice the weight. so do I cull malnourished bass even about the size I set?

would you guys have culled those fish or put em back? I put em back im scared to cull any bigger fish before the spawn even if they are underweight because common sense would say those are the fish with good genes for larger size. also, is there an accurate way to tell the age of a fish?

Too many bass and not enough food are two sides of the same coin. The first one causes the second!

I would take out every fish below 13" and every fish above 13" that is below 100% relative weight. If you use the relative weight chart for a while you'll develop an eye for what a fat fish looks like.

If you go through my thread (see below) you'll see that you really can improve fish quality by intensive selective harvest.

Pat,

+1 to what Bocomo said

With the size of BOW you are dealing with, I would consider bringing in some 24/7 anglers to help out like Tiger Muskie (TM) if they are legal in Kansas. I doubt you and your Buddies can catch enough on your own. Heck, catch what you can, sell the fillets to your neighbors and use the cash to buy the TM!

I salute your efforts!

Bill D.

Edit: Bill C just posted this in another thread in case you miss it. IMO Excellent!

http://forums.pondboss.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=440298#Post440298

I wouldn't cull strictly on a size or slot. I would cull on a relative weight basis. Cull out any fish that are below 100% relative weight. There is a relative weight chart in the archives forum.

Here's why. If you cull strictly on size, you might be culling out a 11" "shooter" bass that is only 1.5 years old. Do you want to toss on the bank a bass that is growing really fast? No, you don't.

What if you have LMB that are 14", skinny and 5 years old? Do you put them back in because they are over 12" in length? No, you shouldn't.

Generally, I would say cull every LMB under 14", but now I'm starting to recommend culling LMB according to RW. To me, it makes more sense. Why cull out fish that might perform very well in your pond?

thanks esshup and thank you everyone else for your advice. after looking over bocomos thread I have a much clearer picture on what I should be doing. gonna go hit the pond again next weekend and im taking a good scale tape measure and a notebook. ill fill everyone in on the progress as it goes!!!!

wanted to updated with some progress. operating big bass is going as planned, weve already culled about 60 fish this year with 4 being under 9 inches, 44 under 14 inches and another 7 over 15 inches but all of em were stunted, several with parasites all under ideal body mass. but they all hit 80-85 percent or higher so the trend is in the right direction. biggest fish last year was a bit over 3 pounds. have caught 4 fish this year now over 4 pounds. id also like to know what kind of weed this is I have growing in there its everywhere and I cant find out what it is

couple more of the bigger fish weve caught so far

my mystery weed that I cant identivy

"Weed" looks like chara, aka muskgrass to me.

They purposely put Chara in a 12 acre lake that's at a water park by me. It's part of the filtration system. Water is Gin Clear all the time, but still goes thru a pretty massive filtration system before it gets pumped back to the water features.

It's pretty cool.

well I have always wondered why the water was so clear out there. but this plant has taken over the pond, it must grown 3 feet deep on patches that cover most of the quarry.