I swim in both of my ponds, as do my kids and allot of our friends. My wife wont. She says the water is dirty, and that's that. My small pond is completely overstocked with catfish. They range in size from five pounds down to babies. There are hundreds of them in there. There are also thousands of bluegill in there with them. The catfish have never bothered anybody and to my knowledge, nobody knows of anybody being bothered by catfish in a pond.
Bluegill on the other hand are a real pain. We've all been bit by them, and if you sit long enough in one spot, several will bite you at the same time!! While it's not painful, they do zero in on a mole and keep going back to them. I have several on my back, and it's so bad that allot of the time I'll wear a T shirt while swimming to avoid being bit by them.
That pond used to have allot of spiders and other water bugs in it. Then I added some flightless ducks to the pond. I feed them everyday, along with my catfish, but even after eating their food, they spend the rest of the day hunting bugs. They cleaned out that pond of bugs in about a month. It's kind of amazing the difference. Ben Franklin loved ducks and he had a saying that went something like this. You don't have a snail problem, you have a lack of ducks problem. Anyway, they are great at eating just about anything and everything that they can catch.
My big pond is also full of fish, but also has turtles and snakes in it. I saw two snakes swimming in it last weekend while mowing around the shoreline. I also saw a very large bullfrog. We also swim in that pond. It's deeper and cooler then the small pond, but you have to go through allot of reeds to get to clear water. Snakes like to hide in those reeds, but you just make allot of noise and they go away. Like everything in nature, they would rather be somewhere else when people are around.
Eddie
