Glad I found this site. I own a fairly large forum myself, so I am thankful for forums in general.
I suspect I will be subscribing to the magazine since I can only imagine it will be a great help to us in getting our pond in order. Something my wife is wanting us to do.
What we have is a very old pond... probably from back in the forties or fifties, it was dynamited.
The pond is supposedly 3.5 acres with the deepest part about 12-15' deep near the dam. It has an upper shallow end section at about 3-4' deep, with one long section down the side at about 2-3' deep. The middle part is about 7-10' deep nearer the shallow end and slowly deepens to the 12-15' at the dam. It has several underwater springs running into it. Back during the serious drought we had, it never got low, while many ponds completely dried up.
I remember back in the 80's and early 90's we used to fish it all along and we would catch some really nice catfish... a few small bass and occasionally we would catch a small bream. It was never managed as far as we know.
In 97-98 there was a pretty serious hurricane that came through with a good bit of rain and the dam broke on the pond. We decided to build our house up above the pond in 1999, so we also had the pond dam fixed.
Here are a few pics from 1999 right after we had the dam fixed, but before it had filled back up.
This is standing on one end of the dam looking back up at the shallow end, which is where you see all the green grass growing. Of course all the grass is obviously gone now. We also cleared out most of that brush before filling it up.
This is a month or two later standing on the same spot of the dam looking back over the deeper part... and the new drain pipe, which is probably 3-4' under water already.
Here is from the other side of the dam looking back up into the shallow end.
Here is later in the Fall and full.
Here is a pic of the dam a couple years later, Summer of 2001.
Then here is a pic in the Fall of 2001. About the only part you cannot see in this pic is that upper shallow end, although a small portion of the deeper area is cut off.
We stocked the pond in 2000 with bream, shellcracker and bass. If I remember correctly, the bream and shellcracker were put in first and then later the bass.
We did not do much to the pond. We never fed the fish. We did get about 60 grass carp and put in there because it got to where you could not cast or troll on the boat for all the grass. Before the summer of 2002 was over, the grass was gone.
The bass were getting pretty nice in 2005-2006... we were catching 4, 5, 6 pounders pretty frequently. Bream and shell cracker were okay, but nothing spectacular. Again, we had no idea what we were doing and really had no guidance. We let any and everyone fish it and within a few years, by 2007-2008, there were practically no more large bass, just very small ones. We were not catching anything other than tiny bream. We decided to close the pond to the public, so for the last 2 to 2.5 years it has been closed. We did get a feeder and have been keeping it full and feeding the fish twice daily with 36% protein feed from the co-op.
We have been fertilizing it pretty well for the last couple of years. We noticed several of our grass carp have died off (floating). We understand their life span is about 10-12 years anyway, so they have lived it. The grass/algae appears to be easing back into the pond, so we plan to restock it with more grass carp.
We haven't fished it much ourselves the last couple of years. Earlier this spring my wife has caught a few very nice bream and we were glad to see they are growing nicely. Last summer I caught a bunch of smaller bass, but no big ones at all. I suspected it was overpopulated, but did not do anything to verify it. I suspect the bass population is very heavy. I fished it earlier this spring and caught mostly smaller bass, less than 2 lbs, most less than a pound. This evening, about an hour before dark, my wife and I got on the boat and decided to do a bit of fishing. I mainly wanted to see what size the bass were and see if they were still on the smaller size. While my wife was getting her stuff together I sat on the boat and made a cast and caught a pretty nice bass a couple lbs or so. It is by far the largest one we have caught in the last three years. I released it.
As we starting trolling... I was catching a bass nearly every other cast. I caught over 10 in a matter of 45 minutes or so, but all of them were less than 12-14" long and all less than a pound or so. We decided to keep them out thinking it has to be over-populated.
So here we are... not sure what to do from here and looking for some guidance on where to start and what to do to get the pond up to par. Hopefully we are going in the right direction with the feeding. Any direction we can get will be greatly appreciated.
