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#450756 06/28/16 02:47 PM
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Good afternoon fellas. I have a 7 acre, spring fed lake in East Texas that we had built in the summer of 2008. The original forage was fat head minnows and blue gill and the bass were added the next year. There are no crappie or cat fish, just bass. Clearly the bass are now over populated and I just began culling some about 6 months ago by tossing any bass less than 14 inches or so on the bank which is extremely painful for me to do. I guess we have tossed 100 to 120 so far and will continue to do so. I have never caught what i would call a "fat" fish. All are rather thin with heads that scream for another half-a-pound body. Someone suggested to me last Friday to go and get as many live crawfish as I could transport and dump them in my lake. My question is; is that a good idea or not and is there any down side in doing so?

Shawman #450761 06/28/16 03:35 PM
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Shawman #450781 06/28/16 07:22 PM
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Shawman, crawfish also need good rocky habitat, or are like feeding the fish pellets....a one meal proposition.

How many BG and bass did you stock? Were they straight northern BG, Coppernose, or hybrids? Hybrids can not produce enough forage to feed LMB....



Rainman #450812 06/28/16 10:53 PM
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Shawman, welcome to the forum!

To turn your pond around, you will need to take out around 30# of bass per surface acre this year.

Then next year take out 20 to 25 pounds of bass per surface acre. Watch the relative weights on the bass, there is a chart in the archives. Start by measuring and weighing the bass now.

That way you can see your improvements next year when you compare fish from next year to this year.

Every year, remove around 20# of bass per surface acre from your pond, of all sizes, but concentrate on the skinny ones. Even a few years down the road when they are not skinny any more, still keep taking out 20# per surface acre.

Both RC51 and Fireishot have success stories of ponds that are just like yours.


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Shawman #450858 06/29/16 10:52 AM
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Rainman frankly i don't know the ratio of Bluegill to Bass at the stocking or the break down of types of forage. We are in Wood Co. Texas and the guy that i bought our property from (who is also a neighbor out there) was a guide on Lake Fork for years and he expressed an interest in stocking it so I let him do it. If you look around the banks there are thousands of minnows swimming around and in the evening I can see a healthy amount of Bluegill (small to up to 8 or so inches) swimming around our Green Monster underwater light with the bass. There does not "appear" to be a shortage of bait fish in our lake but i don't have a trained eye on this matter. But the facts don't lie. My Bass are a bit stunted in their growth. Two years ago I was catching many 2,3, and 4 pound Bass. I haven't caught a 2 pound Bass in almost two years. Going back to the Crawfish topic...my lake bottom is clay or soil with no rocks and I get your comment about the "One meal proposition". I was told that Crawfish mate/spawn up to 3 tmes a year so I thought maybe some would survive the initial stocking so the population could grow. Esshup I have spent enough time on this forum to know that when you speak...we all better listen. I don't know if I can physically catch and cull enough to meet your recomendation. I may need to look in to electrofying to get a large # of fish out. Thanks to you all.

Shawman #450860 06/29/16 11:19 AM
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Shawman,
If you need an idea on crayfish numbers, use a crayfish trap or minnow trap (or make your own, search youtube for crayfish pillow trap) and bait with anything 'meaty' a fresh bluegill carcass, animal liver, etc should give you an idea. Get 10 crays in there in a few hours or piles of them overnight means you got lots of crays. If the trap is in for days and you move it around and struggle to get one in there you may have very few crays.

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Shawman, thanks.

Keep this in the back of your mind when thinking about adding forage for the bass to grow. 10# of forage means one bass can add one pound of weight.......

I think that having the pond electroshocked and the excess bass removed at that time would be much less expensive than adding enough forage for the LMB to gain the weight like you want them to.

How many crawfish in a pound??


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Shawman #450913 06/30/16 07:48 AM
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Shawman, I recently added 70+ lbs of 5 to 6" craws to my 3.5 acre pond. And to answer essups question on how many to a pound, these were 5 to 6" craws and so I would say 10 to 12 to a pound. These are what are available around E Texas now. I already had some Red Swamp craws from the native crawfish and I suspect that is what you have in Wood County. I just wanted to up the numbers @ my place. In my researching, I found out that most all crawfish in E Texas come from the commercial crawfish ponds of years past. They have pretty much taken over our area and left little or no other crawfish around. I am hoping the lmb keep my numbers low smile

Tracy


Last edited by TGW1; 06/30/16 07:50 AM. Reason: sp

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Tracy
Shawman #450923 06/30/16 09:40 AM
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TGW1 i'm getting ready to call a place in Big Sandy that thought that they may have some Crawfish today. If so, I'm going to give it a shot and see if I can at least increase there population in my lake.

Shawman #451026 07/01/16 12:00 PM
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Originally Posted By: Shawman
...I don't know if I can physically catch and cull enough to meet your recomendation. I may need to look in to electrofying to get a large # of fish out.

Shawman, you've got a large pond, and I can tell you from experience, too much experience BTW, that effectively culling LMB via hook and line alone is very difficult to do in that much water. For the past few years my wife and I boat fish our pond at least twice a month. She fishes for pic fish, and I fish for culls. Other than when we have guests, I can't even remember the last time I threw a lure in anger.

Scott is correct, electroshocking is easily the most cost and time effective way to remove large number's of LMB. We've done the forage carousel, and it always seems to temporarily benefit the LMB we're trying to remove anyway. Electroshocking will allow you to set parameters that work for you, and cull accordingly from the LMB shocked up. It's also a very good way to get a feel for your forage numbers and condition.

Three years ago we had our first electroshocking and Clint,the guy that shocked our pond, took all the LMB we wanted out. He told me he cleaned those fish until it was almost time to take the kids to school the next morning. Every LMB under 2#'s was removed, and my marriage almost ended because of it. My WAG is that we removed between 150-200 pounds of LMB. No sorting, no grading, no weighing. They had to go.

These are a few of the buckets of the LMB that were removed.



Last year, we only had to remove under-performing LMB, and I carried everything we culled across the road to my neighbor's pond. They all fit in one big aerated Igloo. It was a much better scenario than the electroshocking 2 years before. Hopefully, when we electroshock next spring, the LMB numbers that need to be removed will decline even more.

As far as forage, we continue to add CNBG from our brood pond, crayfish, and both early and late season stockings of tilapia. The reduced numbers of LMB and the added forage really helped us turn the corner as quickly and cheaply as possible, and our pond is much healthier because of it.

Good luck with your plans.


AL

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shawman, I would take note to what Al (fireishot)and esshup and others have suggested about the management of lmb numbers in a pond like yours. If you are not sure what path to take at this time then I would fish the pond hard and very often and cull any fish smaller than 14" starting now. Maybe you can pick up a good fish scale and measuring board and reduce most of the fish that fall short on the WR (relative weight). Continue these two paths until the wr is at or near 90% and above. And when picking up crawfish, try to get them fresh, or the first day of delivery to the local suppliers.

Tracy


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Tracy
Shawman #451223 07/05/16 12:46 PM
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Thanks FireisHot and TGWI. Any suggestions on who i should talk to about Electroshocking my 7 acre lake? Again, I'm in Wood County near Winnsboro and Quitman. How much should i expect to pay???

Shawman #453992 08/14/16 06:31 PM
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I'd either give Bob Lusk or Todd Overton a call.


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