Pond Boss Forums INTRO Questions & Observations Fishing Report!

George, great photo, great fish. I see you're wearing the TFO hat, was that the new TFO rod you were using?

That must have been some fight on a fly rod!

Jeff, didn't Brandon give you one of those caps at the conference?
DD1 and I got one for sure - he had a big stack of give-aways.....
MY CURRENT LUCKY CAP!

Like a big dummy in left my new Mini-Mag sitting in the cormer of my room when I loaded my truck, so all I had with me was my 5wt TFO "Professinal" model.
Quiet a fight on a 5 wt to be sure, but had O2 live well for transport to main pond.

HSB on a 5 wt...now you would fuss at us for that.
I thought everybody at the PBC got one of those hats.

He sure did, mine is blue.

... ...

My water has been really yucky for the past couple of weeks -- muddy and with small black nasties floating on top. My bluegill aren't coming up for feed, but the catfish and bass are.

Here are some "panfish" I caught the other evening on stale bread before feeding:



The bluegill is 10.5 inches, but I don't remember what it weighed. The bass is 15 inches, but only 1.5 lbs. (Wr = .80?). The catfish was stocky -- it looked like it had a beer belly. Eighteen inches, and just below 3 lbs. It would have been between 12-14 inches when I put it in the pond last May.

The bluegill's stomach was empty. The bass's stomach was empty. The catfish's stomach was packed to stretching with the remains of pellets.

The fish were hitting most anything that plopped into the water. I'm a little concerned over the looks of my water, and the lack of food in the BG and LMB bellies.

Good fishn'
Ken

Ken that does not sound good. What is causing the water degradation ? Our fish are feeding well on pellets as the temps start dropping. What is floating in the water?

I've had a limited number of "small black nasties" for a couple of weeks as well. They look like small (4" across or less) chunks of FA that have floated up from the bottom AND have some kind of decay process going on - if they were on dry land, I would say they are mildewed.

My feeding has been pretty good during this period. However, the BG take a long time to show up and start eating - 5 or 10 minutes. Once they get to the surface, they are eating well.

No muddiness here, and it looks like there is a late-season algal bloom going on. There are a lot of easily visible "pea soup" chunks of small (phytoplankton) floating around in the water as well.

Theo and Ewest,

I'm not sure what is causing my water issues. I'm not sure if I even have a water problem. I really shouldn't be having any based on the conditions we've had all summer.

We've had good rains throughout the summer. My water level is currently about 2-3 inches below the standpipe, which is pretty good for this time of year. For the past couple of weeks the weather has been mostly sunny and in the 70s during the day and in the 40s-50s at night. We almost always have wind during the day, so I know the water is getting pushed around a lot. Nothing has changed in my watershed -- at least nothing visible within at least a half mile of my pond.

The few bluegill that are coming up to feed are the little ones, mostly 3-5 inches. Much like Theo's, it takes a while for them to arrive. I'm not seeing any medium to large bluegill coming up to feed. There are still about 10-20 bass that are feeding, and of course the catfish.

The water has cleared somewhat in the last couple of days, but it is still brown, rather than green. I'm back to about 12-18 inches of visibility. I have absolutely no idea of what caused all the muddiness. It was during a period of almost no rain.

My "small black nasties" really are quite small. They look like ash from a burned cardboard box. Hardly any are more than an inch across, and they are thin. They float in a "slick." I'm beginning to think they are decayed leaves that the catfish are stirring up. I see a few bigger chunks that sound like what Theo described.

I seemed to have had a pretty good bluegill and bass spawn earlier this year, but I'm seeing very few YOY. I get a few small LMB in my trap if I leave it out for a hour or two, but almost no BG. I don't know if I'm catching so few because they have so much structure to hide in now, or if they've all been eaten.

One other thing. The bass I've caught recently have had red teeth. That is, the area in the roof of their mouths where their teeth are, has been red. I usually only see that in the early springtime when they first start feeding. A Wr of about 0.8 for my bass is pretty normal -- so I wasn't concerned about the one in the picture above.

Oh well, I guess this is the fun of having a pond. Hopefully it is nothing to be concerned about.

Good fishn'
Ken

The brown may be from a late zooplankton bloom and not mud unless the CC are really stirring things up or wind erosion of the bottom/banks. Could just be cooler water temps are slowing things down. Have you checked the water temp ?

Spent last evening and this morning trying to catch some RES brood stock to transfer to main pond. Only caught and transfered two but they were nice ones.

Problem was, every cast or so hooked 2006 class HSB (3 - 4 #"s) and/or 2007 class (1 - 1 1/2#'s) - guess about 20 in all.
Big problem huh?
Not bad survival rate in 1/4 acre pond with record braking heat wave summers, with no aeration.
Gave the larger HSB a breath of pure O2 and released them back into pond.
Near surface warer temp 77.0 degrees.

They were wrecking havoc on BG fry around edges of pond.
Keeping them hungry with minimal AQMX 600 feeding.

Little pond has been a god-send after shock of early July fish kill in main pond.
Also caught several BG and a couple of cull TAF CNBG transferees from main pond - 10+ inchers.

I caught & moved one RES breeder to my new pond as well last night, george; a 9" male. That gives me a total of 27 (or 29? Damn computer hard disk crash last month cost me two weeks of records!) in 1/2 acre.

It's really neat to grow-out and transfer fish - Bruce told us so....!
I've only transferred 4 nice RES to main pond for brood stock so far but will have more.

I'm comfortable with sexing BG but need to go back to archives for RES ID...
Eric - Help....?

From Peterson Field Guides - Freshwater Fish.

Breeding male is brassy gold , has dusky pelvic fins, short ear, thin, flexible red ear edge on gill cover.

Ken, your chunky catfish looks a lot like a 'high fin' blue, or at least a hybrid; any chance?

Eric, good photos. I would have a hard time sexing RES. So, the male actually has a smaller ear tab. APB, I'm afraid to get near enough to know for sure.

I wish Bruce would join in on sexing Redears. IIRC he has done so successfully to combine male BG and female RES for hybrid production, but I think he only considers a Redear a certain female if it is gravid.

I need help with both RES and GSF. I can't tell a male from a female. I made it a minor reseach project to determine how to differentiate between a male and female GSF. I didn't have any luck. Apparently it's very difficult. I read something about squeezing their gametes or something like that, but that sounded way, way too painful for the fish so I gave up.

It is just the way the fish is laying in the pan, and the angle of the photo. It did have a pretty big pot belly (mostly from all the pellets it had eaten). But other than that, it was just a plain old channel cat. It was also a "talker." It croaked and croaked at me from the lawn where I threw it before bringing it up to clean it.

Is it just where I live, or is it cool? This evening, my water is at 64 degrees four feet down, at the end of my dock. It should cool off even more in the next couple of days because of a big storm that is just starting to come in. If this keeps up, I may go get my winter trout next weekend. Last year was so warm I couldn't put them in until Halloween.

It's global warming!

Let's not go there. I like this thread.

Not enough pictures lately though.

I'm getting the evil red "X."

Here are a few of the fish I caught today.

That's a big cat. 8+ lbs?