Well it's been 18 months since my 'drain and start over' project, so I thought I'd give my status update, as well as lessons learned etc.

To recap the project, I have a 1 acre pond, oval in shape. Steep sides, average depth of around 13' with max at about 20'. We use the pond mostly for swimming but it's always had fish in it - pond is about 25 years old, and I've only owned it for 13.

When I first bought the property, the pond had an overabundance of large (6-10lb) CC's. They were the main predator and were VERY difficult to catch. I didn't want them in there so after several years of trying to catch them out I decided to drain, kill, and restart.

There's a couple of posts I did that talk through the drain portion - needless to say it was zero fun.

I restocked with RES, YP and WE, with FHM and GSH as supplemental food. Intention was to wait a year or so and then stock SMB.

Couple of fairly significant mistakes I made - one of which has turned into a kind of cool anomaly, and the other one sucks.

My kill wasn't complete. I ended up with GSF and unfortunately at least 2 LMB.

The cool part is I as of now have an entire pond chock full of GSF-RES hybrids, up to around 8" in length at this point. They're fun to catch and seem to be doing very well on the growth side of things.

The less cool part is I unfortunately have a school of YOY LMB. This was NOT part of the plan but probably inevitable based on my pond layout/vicinity to my large pond/etc.

I'm looking to stock 6-8" SMB this fall. Hopefully they'll be able to out-eat the LMB, especially given that this pond is built with SMB in mind - steep sides, rock bottom, etc. I'm probably kidding myself but hey, worth a shot.

The YP are there but not in the numbers I'd hoped. Seen several 8-9"ers this spring already, but no sign of egg strands on the trees I put in for them.

I'd mentioned on a previous post last summer, one very odd side effect is I managed to get at least 1 successful spawn from the WE....I was swimming in the pond last summer and hand caught a 1.5 incher that was 100% a WE. No pics as obviously I was swimming....had I thought about it I'd have headed to the shore with him and snapped some.


Dale

[Linked Image from i90.photobucket.com]

"When tempted to fight fire with fire, remember that the Fire Department usually uses water." - anonymous