Pond Boss Forums INTRO Questions & Observations Clear water and perch school

Amazing water clarity sill. The camera is down about 7 feet, looking at about a 12 foot bottom with some deeper. A large perch school with a black crappie in the mix too (if you look carefully).

I am not seeing very many minnows! Clarity is probably making it rather tough on minnow survival.

Pond was dug in the fall of 2011 so I am pleased at the low accumulation of muck and debris. Pretty clean still, though not a lot of nutrients down there for supporting small life. The water gets a continuous flushing from late fall until early summer from a small intermittent stream.

I have yet to spot a Walleye, and the two I managed to catch this summer were clearly starving and not doing well. The perch and crappie have out-competed them.

Fish School

It looks like I have a mostly Black Crappie and Perch pond. I will probably throw some same-sexed bass in there next spring to cull the herds. Maybe a HSB instead. Still unsure. I am probably going to hop over to corrective stocking to get some ideas.

Enjoy!

If anyone wants the full video of a tour across the entire pond bottom, let me know. It is kind of boring as there is not a lot of fish to see. Water was only 42 degrees and we just experienced a quick thaw of all of the ice.

Thanks for sharing.

Is the green coloration somewhat of weak algae bloom or is it the lighting that makes it appear that way?

My hatchery ponds have their most intense algae blooms this time of year.

I believe a lot of the coloration is from the alkalinity of the water. Lots of lime in the soil. Since this is 7 feet down looking through another 6-7 feet to the bottom, we are looking through a lot of water. The perch are likely 4-6 feet from the camera. I think the camera has a high level of color saturation as well making it look a lot more green than it really is. Visually it just looks plain clear.

If I pull water from the pond into a container, it is as clear as tap water with very few gizmos swimming about.

I really wish I had a live feed on the camera so I could see what the heck was going on. It took a lot of tries to get a decent rig set up to see this. I cannot transmit WiFi through 7 feet of water.

Any chance your using a Gopro for the video. You can get the wifi wo work with a simple trick if your using the go pro.

Nah, it is a Contour with no WiFi. Otherwise I would run a piece coax and antenna on a float up to the surface or something like that. What trick have you heard of?

Of course I don't have a laptop either, so that doesn't help much :-(. Pond is frozen again, so probably not giving it another try until some time in June when it thaws.

Ya same with the coax. You could even run it all the way to the house. Ours is 400 feet away from the pond. I run a small repeater down for the kids... well one of the three. He cant seem to hang with mom and dad with out his buddy wifi.