Pond Boss Forums FISH & FISHING Sunfish-Including Largemouth and Smallmouth Bass Had some fun today with pumpkinseed

Friends invited us to visit them in Cape Cod at their vacation home while on our motorcycle holiday traveling around. These are scuba diving friends that we dive with in the Caribbean. While I could not carry dive gear on the motorcycle, we did go out snorkeling in local Hathaway Pond. It is a small 20 acre glacial fresh water lake on the cape.

What a treat. Water temperature must have been in the mid 70's (brrrr) and we snorkeled for a couple hours. Saw lots of PS in the shallows with some nice 6-8" males on nests. Some lone ones and also saw a decent size spawning colony. It was interesting that these PS were in a much more loosely knit colony than my BG in my pond that I observed a couple weeks ago before leaving. After a while we finally found one nest with a male guarding eggs laying in the bottom of the nest.

Also found a few LMB nests and one with an 18" male nervously lurking about. Upon closer inspection there must have been a thousand tiny 1/4" fry in about a 2.5' diameter ball hovering above the nest of about the same size. The fry had hatched and the male was keeping predators away. Really cool.

We found one other nest with fry about the size of knats. I could not tell if the nearby LMB was the dad or a nearby 8" PS was the dad. One was probably guarding the fry and the other wanting to eat them, but both would stay close and interested but I could not tell which the nest belonged to.

The friend I was snorkeling with regularly sucba dives this pond but he usually goes into deeper water where a boat and other stuff is sunk for the diving community to look at. He is an avid under water photographer, and I think I have his interest peaked to play more in the shallows to try and get some photos of the fish in the shallow water. He normally only does photos of stuff in salt water. Water visibility was good at probably 10 feet.

We about froze with no wet suits on, but were finding so much interesting fish stuff that only extreme shivering forced us out of the water.

Also saw a couple schools of small YP out in open water. He said there were some larger perch in the pond, but we never saw any.

Not my pond, but it was a cool experience for me to watch some fish I have never seen but in pictures. Also seeing both eggs and fry being guarded by the males was very cool. Those PS are pretty fish, and the size some of these were I would not mind putting a few in my pond. Bigger than I imagined they could get.

If anyone wants to know more about Hathaway Pond Cape Cod just do a search and lots of stuff comes up.

Nice report! Thanks!

Where are the photos!