Others can probably give you better advice. But from what I have read it is not really recommended fishing where you feed as it will tend to make the fish avoid the food or get hook shy. If that is the case I suspect casting a net would be even more disruptive, but I do not know that as a fact.

In my case with this pond, the brood stock RES I really don't care if they get hook shy. In fact I would just as soon not catch them generally, although I do like to hook into one once in a while to see what size they and how they are doing. But if they get hook shy, it is probably best for both them and me.

Most of the other fish I move to another pond anyway. So they get caught once and moved to another environment. That is the real purpose of this pond, raise RES to populate my main pond. That and golden shiners (used to be FHM but between the RES and a couple GSF, the FHM got extirpated). I trap and move small fish with minnow traps and larger ones by hook and line.

Another thing is I don't really fish this pond all that often. So the fish might get fed 30 times for every one time I feed and fish.

Sorry I can't really give you a good answer, but in my case I am not too worried about putting the fish off feed by luring them in with feed. The times I have done it, I throw out some more feed and they are right back to the trough.

I think what I am mostly feeding are the RESxGSF hybrids and golden shiners. And to a much lesser degree some of the RES.

Last edited by snrub; 03/28/17 10:02 PM.

John

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