Pond Boss Forums INTRO Questions & Observations Fishing out of your pond

Can someone suggest how you can keep 'caught' fish healthy enough to put back in the pond, until you know your going to catch enough to make it worthwhile to clean them? Last night we caught one 2 lb CC. After two hours not another one was caught. Of course, we had put the one in the cooler with ice and water so we were forced to clean one fish.... Can you put 'just pond water' in the cooler, then put the fish back in the pond and expect him to survive...let's say after an hour or so???

I don't have a good answer for you question. But someplace on here I would like to say I really love this site. I just discovered it last night and couldn't pull myself away reading links.

I do have one question if someone would be kind enough to reply. What fish is CC. I will able to understand every other fish initial but not CC.

Thanks, and glad to be on.

Try a fish basket. This picture is from Cabelas. They have two sizes. I got my last one at Gander Mountain. They had a gigantic one that would hold several of 3-4 lb. catfish easily. I keep fish for several days in a medium sized basket hung on the end of my dock.




Bill -- first, welcome to the Pond Boss forum. Somewhere there a a posting that lists a lot of the abreviations used here -- maybe somebody can remember the link to it. In the mean time, CC = Channel Catfish. You'll also run across BG for Blue Gill, HBG for Hybrid Blue Gill, HSB for Hybrid Striped Bass, LMB for Large Mouth Bass, GSF for Green Sun Fish, RES for the feared Red Eared Sunfish, and the list goes on, and on, and ...


Ken

Acronyms
-
This is located within the Common Pond Q & A (archives) , a good place to start for most PB (Pond Boss) stuff.
-
Good ta have ya here, Bill!

Thanks every one for the help and the welcome. It shows how brain dead I am today that I couldn't think of channel catfish. But probably the reason is I had so many questions and over the years that I got either bad advise or kind of been snooted at by goverment types because I only had an 1 acre pond and last night by accident I ran across this site I stayed up almost all night reading. A lot of things make sense now. I look forward to visiting this site often.

Welcome, Bill.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Bruce

Pond Girl:

A little additional info. The basket style fish keep Cat showed is an excellent way to hold fish indefinitely. There are of course limits on how many fish you can hold in one without their becoming injured, so you may want to consider what size to get based on what your critical mass of fish for keeping is. I have kind of a medium size basket keep and two large CC (3 lbs+) scar each other up pretty good inside it in short order.

For short term storage, I put BG in a 5 gallon bucket with about 3 gallons of water in it (more water and they can jump out). This method has the disadvantage of having a limited supply of O2 in the limited supply of water. You can keep a couple of BG alive OK in a bucket for over a half hour, though.

One other thing to think about is keeping, cleaning, and storing sub-meal sized portions of fish. The forum has previously discussed the practice of freezing fish fillets in a ziplock bag with a fair quantity of water and as little air as possible, to prevent freezer burn. IIRC about half of us can't really tell a difference between fresh and fish frozen using this method. I use this method for BG (to build up the 30+ fillets it takes to feed three kids - one 12, one 16, and one 48) and CC and my family has had no problems with the frozen fish for periods exceeding 6 months of storage.

I have kept small bass and bluegill alive for rather long periods of time by using a rectangle "Rabbit Hutch" which I buy at Rural King, but I am sure they are available from most farm supply and pet supply stores. The wire hutch I use is about 14 x 24 x 36 inch, but they are available in a variety of sizes. They come disassembled but are easy to put together. The cost is around $15.00.

While fishing from my dock I generally use a basket such as is described in the above posts. When I am through fishing for the day, or when the basket gets full, I put the fish in the hutch and lower in into the four to five foot deep water by the dock.

I have found that large snapping turtles are much less likely to try to break into the hutch than a basket.

Yesterday my cousin and his grandchildren and I caught and eventually cleaned between 50 and 60 bluegill. That many fish did not seem to overcroud the hutch.

When I quit bluegill fishing late last fall, late October or very early November, I forgot to clean or release the three bluegill I caught. New Year's Day was nice and warm for Illinois and I took my five grandchildren down to the dock to do some fishing and mainly to try out the new rod and reel outfits each had received for Christmas. I discovered that the hutch was still in the water. The three bluegill were alive and well. Although this could not happen in the warmer waters of summertime, they still survived about two months with no attention. It seems that enough food gets to them that they do quite well.

Bing