Today was a red letter today for me!! Emphasis on RED!!

My in laws were in from out of state. Their young kids wanted to go fishing. I figured the perch would be up for it as they very aggressively will grab jigs, small hook and worm, or their favorite, green stubby steve pellets.

They did manage to catch the box spring and mattress triangular tent like contraption that I sunk for cover. I'm going to have to put some strings with floats on the 4 corners of that thing so we know where NOT to cast in the future.

Water continues to drop due to evaporation (I hope) and no rain.

I worked on my gold fish trap design. I'm putting a net across the shallow with one about 3' out from shore and the other end right on shore. The hope is that if I throw pellets between shore and the seine net that fish will learn they can't get to the pellets unless they do an end run around the open end of the net. Once they get used to going through that dangerous opening and nothing happens, then one day when a bunch are in there eating pellets, I close off that end and hopefully harvest a bunch.

The Frabil brand net had a poly netting which has a little bigger mesh size which is fine, but the poly will hold up better than the smaller minnow nets that have a cloth mesh that dry rots easier. But somehow the engineers messed up and the sum of the weights on the bottom does not equal or exceed the sum of the floats on top. It doesn't hold the bottom of the net down!

I thought about different things to attach to the bottom to weight it. Using washers or bolts came to mind but steel can get expensive these days. I could buy a bunch of fishing weights and put them all along the bottom, I considered trying to buy in bulk online. But then I figured the cheapest would be stone or concrete. I thought about tying stones in mesh sacks and cable tying those on. Then I wanted to pour concrete into some coffee cans for some anchors anyway so I bought the smallest bag they had of fast drying concrete (red bag)

I found about 30 small plastic cups and then I took some left over underground burial wire from my dog fence to make it work. I took the dog fence wire and started with a 3" tag, then looped the wire around a screwdriver barrel 3 times to make a coil then another 3" tag then snipped the end. I made 30 of these coils with 2 long tags. I then filled the cups about 1/3 full of concrete, pushed that round coil part of the wire down in the concrete to give the concrete some area of wire to hold on to and then let it harden.


Then it was simple to take a scissors and make a small slit in the side of the cup and peel the cup off the concrete weights. I had hoped that these weights would not grab too much on the bottom when seining and wouldn't rust like steel. If I didn't need them or wanted to add more weight or take some away it would be pretty easy to undo the twist in the tag end of the wire and take them off.

taking them out of the mold:



I didn't know how many to add, I have 2 25' seine nets zip tied together, adding 30 weights would have been too much. We ended up counting 2 of the factory weights, putting one between the 2nd and 3rd factory weights, etc. and then adding a weight at both ends to help hold down the ends.



I waded back in the pond and put it back in place. World of difference now with the bottom end staying nice and close to the bottom of the pond. Before the fish were sneaking under to get from the deep to shallows to sneak up and get the pellets, now they truly will have to learn to go around the side. Might take a little to train them.

It started to rain slightly. The kids fished away. One caught a goldfish on a tiny orange jig with worm, one caught a smaller perch, then the excitement of the night!!

I saw my little niece bringing in something that wasn't fighting like a perch or a goldfish. This one was making rapid darts back and forth and even some circles. That was a new pattern of fighting, very much like a BG or sunfish. I had stocked RES at about 1.5" 2 years ago and then restocked a few last spring but always wondered if they had survived the winter... The good news is at least one did!!

I'm pretty sure I was more excited than the kids were when I caught a glimpse of the sunfish type body and then the red spot on the ear tab!!!



I tried to get a picture of the underside but the light was bad and the pigments dark. There appeared to be waste coming out of the one hole obscuring it. The urogenital pore seemed to be small but very hard to tell on this small fish.



So geeked that the RES survived (hopefully a few) I imagine some may pull off a spawn this year too. What a great thing to discover today and to think they were hanging out all along, just playing hard to catch.