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#500398 01/06/19 12:40 AM
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I live in central PA. I am considering stocking adult trout in my pond in early spring. My pond temps reach 80 degrees in summer so I know I willl need to harvest all trout by late spring. I have a small 1/4 to 1/3 acre pond. About 10 feet deep in middle with two sides fairly steep. I have an aerator that has run 24/7 since last May. Moved it to 2 ft depth for winter. I have LMB, BG, 7 HSB, (stocked 10, kept three in warm weather fishing) FHM (which have spawned successfully)
I contacted a local trout farm and got prices to truck deliver trout. $500 minimum with $170 delivery. I was interested in 11-12” trout. I was told $500 would be 170 trout in that size. She recommended mixing in some 12-18” and only get 100 11-12” to meet minimum.
I really don’t want $700 worth of dead floating trout. So what should I do to prepare? Should I have my water tested? What are trout sensitive too?

Planning a family fishing weekend so I expect to remove a large quantity the first weekend. Any suggestions on my quantity to buy? I don’t want them to destroy the forage base for existing fish. Will there be enough oxygen for that many fish even for a short time?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

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Hi Mike,

Are you planning to feed the trout pellets?


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Good morning Mike. Good to see you posting again. I, for one, am curious about how your pond has done for the last two years. I grew up in se Pa. so this thread is sort of close to home.

I sense that you're thinking dumping a slug of up to 170 trout into your pond would be a shock to the system. Ha ha. I can just hear the bass and bluegills muttering, "There goes the neighborhood. Dang slimeys."

Have you considered hauling the trout yourself? If your hatchery will sell smaller quantities, then perhaps a thing to try is to buy 10 or 20. Introduce them and see how they do. Then, if they are ok after a week or two, go back and get however many you really want.

I've transported, without any mortality, as few as 1 or 2, and up to 20 in tall trash cans and coolers of various sizes. My drives have been 1 to 1 1/2 hours. No aeration but with bottles of my pond's water frozen and floating in the containers. When I've gotten home, I open the water bottles to start the acclimation of the fish to my pond's water.

You'll get some more ideas from other forum members soon. Please keep us posted about your plans and implementation.

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Thanks for the response 4 corners. The pond has been doing pretty good. If you saw my other posts you know I enlarged it from 1/8 acre to over 1/4 acre. Added a dock and an aerator. This spring I stocked one quart daphnia, 1000 FHM, 10 HSB, AND 6CC. Had leftover LMB and BG, tons of trapdoor snails. Stocked crayfish a few years ago before it was illegal. Don’t know if there are any left in there though. Planted some pickerel plants, blue iris and a couple potted Lilly pads. I hand feed aquamax every evening from spring to fall. Took a while for stripers to feed. But once they started they are voracious feeders and are a blast to watch. Stocked them at 6” in May. The three we kept were between 12” and 14” in August. My pond still is fairly turbid from the aerator. Was hoping it would settle better after a few months. I can see fish about a foot down when I feed them, so it could be worse I guess. I was getting very inconsistent ph readings through summer. Mainly got readings around 6.0 with test strips. Dumped a few hundred lbs of lime. Had a friend with a better tester come over and told me it went up to about 8.0 ph. The only downside is that I had a pretty substantial algae bloom in late fall. And everything still has a light covering of fuzzy algae.

I never thought about transporting a test group of trout. That is a great idea. You said you used tall garbage cans. Did the hatchery fill them with their water or did they have them bagged? I am about an hour and a half away from them. I think I’ll email them and see if that is an option. Very little ice so far this year but I will have open water with the aerator running even if it freezes over. Should I wait for a day with temps above freezing so the water in the cans doesn’t freeze. Hour and a half in back of truck. Thanks again for any input.

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Bill,
I have some aquamax left. Will trout eat that?

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Mike, I've fed Aquamax 600, Skretting, and now Optimal BG to my trout over the years. They ate all of it. However, while on the AM and the Skretting they tasted like hatchery planters.

Nowadays, the ones I harvest that are eating Optimal taste close to good wild trout. These are rainbows RNBT, and browns BRNT. I haven't eaten any of my tiger trout yet. They haven't seemed to want to grow and they won't bite anything.

What you might consider is to ask the hatchery what they are feeding, get some of that either from them or from a feed store, and then either continue feeding that, or change to something else by mixing the feeds for a week or two to accustom them to the new stuff.

Sounds like you are in for some fun.

Thanks for the updated info about your pond, btw.

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Trout will do well on left over Aquamax providing it is not over 12 months old and not moldy. If the aerator is creating open water at the shoreline you can stock them now if the farm has them in an open raceway.

If you have other fish now living in the pond you will not need to test the water. Trout in cold water fall, winter, early spring are very tolerant of degraded water quality; all that is needed is high DO. I've seen trout in cold streams below a municipal sewage outfall; so they are quite tolerant as long as DO is high.

Last edited by Bill Cody; 01/06/19 08:45 PM.

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That is VERY encouraging Bill. Now I’m fired up to start making trips to the hatchery. Any advice on transporting? The aquamax is less than a year old, but I may look into the optimal that 4 Corners recommended.

Thanks for the advice everybody.

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One other thing Bill...

What numbers do you recommend for my small pond? I’m thinking about getting 10-20 now but before the big fishing weekend get a large number to fish for. Assuming we will remove a large percentage of them that weekend. Is 170 way too many? Will it be better to mix in larger fish to get less numbers or will that end up being more detrimental?

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Mike, I want to reiterate what Bill said: Do NOT use moldy feed. Will kill fish! In fact, I'd recommend you dispose of it in ways that dogs can't get to, either. sick

Last edited by anthropic; 01/06/19 10:41 PM.

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You can easily put in 170 trout in a 0.25 ac pond in cold weather especially when you are planning to remove a lot of them. Nature will take care of removing all the remaining trout in July-August. Mixed sizes are okay. Some hatcheries have golden trout. If available you could stock a few of them as prize fish, where the angler gets some sort of prize if that fish is caught. This make the fishing experience a little more exciting. Consider contacting the Stubby Steve baits website for getting very good high quality artificial pellets for anglers to use as good trout catching baits.
http://stubbysteves.mybigcommerce.com/

Last edited by Bill Cody; 01/07/19 08:15 PM.

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