I thought I'd chronicle my efforts to improve a family pond in Marianna Florida. It's about 5-6 acres with a max depth of 6-10 feet, both depending on the rain. I presume it is an old sink hole since they are all over the place in that area. I'm not sure how they got there but it contains a semingly balanced population of LMB, CNBG, warmouth and gambusia. We use it for swimming and fishing and I'd like to make it more attractive for both activities.
The water has been at the lower end of the range for several years, exposing the cover and turning the pond into a big, featureless mud hole. When the water is calm, I can see the tops of my feet to about 3 feet. I presume tannins are coming from the surrounding oaks and dying the water but old organic matter on the bottom makes it look darker than it is.
To give the fish somewhere to hang out, I tied some brush piles together and sank them 40 or so feet from shore. That worked pretty good and I got lazy so I started chucking limbs from the trees into the water up to about 15 feet out. The bass have been working the piles hard and I think it provided some shelter for the little guys.
I started feeding the fish in one spot, twice a day, about a year ago. At first I was using Aquamax 600 but I could only get it from a store that was out of the way so I've been using some high protein stuff from Tractor Supply. The AM600 was a little more expensive but it seemed to build the fish faster and w/ about a third more protein, should be a legitimate claim.
After reading that liming might be beneficial, I purchased cheap pH and Total Dissolved Solid meters from Amazon. The pH was 6 +/- .1 and the harndess (I pressume TDS is analogous to total hardness) was 12 ppm. I picked up a 50 lb bag of hydrolyzed lime and dumped it all in the water next to my feeder. When I came back the next week, all of the mud was gone from that area. I later learned that I should have used dolomitic lime. Oops. Fortunately, it was a small area in a relatively large BOW. It gave me hope that liming might clear up some of the organic matter on the bottom.
Last week I spent a lot of time working on the lake by adding some pallet huts, rock piles and 18 tons of ag lime.
Short of the correct equipment, I decided to rig up my trash pump to broadcast the lime. It worked pretty good but would have been better suited for a smaller BOW. The first day I pumped about half of the lime. On the second go I added 100 feet to the blue hose to get the lime a little closer to the other side. There's a pile of pea gravel in the two spots where the pipe output. A more zealous individual would have oscillated the output pipe in several locations but it was all I could do to shovel/spray the lime to the intake of the pump and was just happy to get all of it in the water.
It's hard to tell from the picture but what is normally a very dark brown/black lake looks a little milkier after the first day of pumping. The process also produced some bubbles that can be seen floating in the middle. It had all settle out come the second morning.
18 tons was the smallest amount they'd deliver and I didn't want to make a bunch of trips with my trailer and Jeep. It was 6.80 a ton for ag lime and 5 a ton for delivery. I also bought, and self delivered, a ton of #2 lime rock for rock beds. They're about 1.5-2 inches in diameter and I placed them in 3 spots.
