Pond Boss Forums INTRO Questions & Observations the beach clean-up and Lake Georgetopia

Well we got out to the pond yesterday to remove a few fish from Georgetopia and to my horror, I found the aerator not running. It turns out that the on/off switch burned up. The fish took food willingly and seemed to not be in any stress, but, I figured if we were going to remove some fish, it might be prudent to remove some more if all goes well on the first pass.

Well the first pass of the new seine was interesting to say the least. We needed to slow down even more than I expected. As the net drew in water, it sank easier and was very easy to work with in Georgetopia. We decided to seine only the shallow half of the pond for the first pass. That seine pass turned up a lot of fish and everything worked well. We did add a frozen bottle of water to each cooler as suggested by one of the experts and they cooled the water and lowered the stress on the fish being transferred to the big pond.

Here are a few pics of the fish we transferred;

Clearly this is one of the original stockers!!



Here is another original stocker!!



A better view.



Here are a samples of the fish we transferred:





And of course, we did find evidence of several successful spawns from the CNBG and Tilapia.

Here is a picture of some of the size classes we found in Georgetopia.



And here are some Tilapia focused pictures.









While the transfer only took about 10 minutes per pass, we could see that adding the frozen bottle of water really helped the fish out. We forgot the frozen water bottle in one of the coolers on one of the passes and it was very obvious to us that those fish were more stressed.

All in all, we believe we lost very few fish. I only found two or three CNBG floaters and they were very small fish. I only found two Tilapia that could not be revived and they mostly came from the cooler that did not have the frozen water bottle.

We calculate that we moved around 30-40 Lbs of fish from Georgetopia and we learned a lot about the process. Remember that we found the non-functional aerator when we arrived which drove us to remove some more fish after we found that our process was sound and quick.

And about our aerator, well we removed the failed switch and it is running great!!