Hello everyone, I've been lurking here for a while but this is my first post. Great site, I've read a lot of interesting things here! In January I moved into a rental house that has a decent sized pond on the property. It is a flood control dam that was built in the 50's to protect a few towns downstream from flooding. There is no steady source of water flowing into it, only runoff, so water levels fluctuate. Below are pics of the lake almost dry, full, and close to where it is now. According to the property owner, the lake has only gone dry two times although it isn't unusual for it to get low in late summer/fall and hold their until spring. The first time I saw the lake was November and it's held at the same level over the last few months, about where the current picture is. Just a guestimate on my part, but from what he said the lake has a max depth of 12', so I'm guessing that it's at about 6' or so right now, and when full I was told it covers 7 acres. As you can see from the pics the water is pretty clear, he says it's pretty much always like that and if it rains enough to muddy it up it's clear again in a few days. I haven't fished this yet so I have no idea what's in there, if anything. The owner says that it has had bass, bluegill, perch, crappie, and channel catfish stocked in it as well as some suckers from a local river. However, that was before it went dry and he said he thinks the only thing left are bass, although I'm not sure why that's his opinion. Based on the picture of the lake when dry, I'd be surprised if there is anything left in there as it hasn't been stocked since then. The lake has produced at least two decent sized bass in the 5 lb class that I've seen pictures and one of which was mounted in the house I'm in before I moved in but I'm not 100% sure when they were caught, I think the mounted one had a date of some time in the early 90's but that may be inaccurate. I'd like to help improve any fish populations that exist now and/or establish new ones. With a lake that can fluctuate like this one, with the potential to dry up, is there a point in trying to establish a permanent fish population or would it be better to establish a stocking dependant fishery such as catfish for the summer and trout for the winter? With a self sustaining population the first problem I can think of would be lack of cover for prey species. As you can see from the dry picture, there's not really anything in the way of cover other than a some random rocks which I can't see being a big help. There is a pretty good layer of rock covering the base of the dam but I don't think it'd be beneficial to anything but fry. I think that this problem could lead to a large population of stunted bass and not much else and may be why there are only bass in there now, if that is truly the case. My personal preference would be to add some heavy cover into the shallow end and maybe the far corner of the dam, opposite of the slide but I'm not sure if the property owner would go for that or if he'd prefer to keep the lake clean, I'm thinking the latter is probably more likely to be the case. Also, I'm not sure what the forage base for the prey fish would be. Other than some algae there is pretty much no plant life so I'm not sure if there is much in the way of bugs and what not for bluegill or whatever to eat. If going the stocking route this could be a problem as well and may lead to having to have a feed based population. One idea that has crossed my mind is trying to develop the fishery into one based on large bluegill or another sunfish with a very small number of bass, maybe 10-15 total. If this is the route taken, my plan would be to introduce adult bluegill this spring followed by small bass in the late summer/early fall. I would think that this would only be viable if there are no bass currently in the lake though. Would channel catfish be a viable alternative to bass? If the stocking to sustain option is taken, what kind of numbers would be needed to have an enjoyable fishery? The main people fishing would be me, my 6 year old daughter, and maybe a couple of relatives so there probably wouldn't be much pressure. Would maybe 250 channel catfish either every year or every other year and roughly the same number of trout every fall be sufficient? The state fisheries department suggests stocking 100 trout/acre but I don't really have a need to harvest that many trout so would I realy need to stock that many to have decent fishing? Any opinions or thoughts would be appreciated, sorry if this was long winded, I didn't think it'd end up that way when I started
