Pond Boss Forums MANAGING AN EXISTING POND Evaluating and adjusting fish populations Relative weights seem to be great!

After a summer of growth and reading on this forum how to measure relative weights, I just had to go fishing!
So after a full year of bait production last year I stocked 500 1-2” BG, 250 RES, and 30 2-3” LMB on March 20,2017. I bought a scale and decided to get the grand kids and have a family day of measuring fish. Everyone had a blast!
So we caught and measured 11 BG and 6 LMB. The highest RW of the BG was 187. The highest RW of the LMB was 132. Average RW of all BG caught was 137. Average RW of all LMB was 116.
I hand feed Optimal BG and assume that is the reason for the higher RW for the BG. The BG went through a first year spawn in August. I’m sure the next couple of years will be the more difficult years to try to maintain a population balance. It will be awesome to see what the LMB can do next year!
I just wanted to say thank you to everyone on this forum for all the great information! I don’t post a lot but sure do check in and read and research!

Hunter, thanks for the post and it is exciting to see all the forage go to good use.

So to understand this, when were the BG stocked? You said they were 1-2" on March 20 of 2017? And they grew enough to spawn by August? or did they go in in 2016?

What was the typical length of the BG and Bass?

Great news for how well optimal works! I don't know if you saw the link below from the Optimal folks wanting volunteers to help test some new secret ingredients in their products but it sounds like you and your relatively new pond would be a great test case since all your fish have known is optimal in its current state and you can demonstrate any preference to the new feed composition.

see this and if you are interested, send them a PM:

Blinded trial for new optimal ingredients

Yes, they were stocked in March 2017 at 1-2” size. They spawned in August, I could see about half a dozen BG on nests over a sand beach area in August then found a couple of live 1/4” size BG in a raft floating on the pond when I took it out in September. The only way they could’ve got into the raft is through the mesh bottom. They had to be feeding in the raft bottom until they grew large enough they couldn’t get back out of the mesh.
They average length of the BG are 6” now. The average for the LMB we caught was 12”.
To be fair, we fished off of our dock which is where I feed so the size of the BG will be larger at this location than the remainder of the pond.
Thanks for the link, I certainly will pm them!