I hope you all had a great Christmas! I have been working on our structure plan using the topo as recommended. I tried to find shallow areas that dropped into 8-10 foot of water quickly. My plan is to sink Christmas trees in clusters in the deeper areas and hopefully plant some vegetation in the shallower bedding areas. We are also open to adding gravel or other stone to these bedding areas if it would be an advantage for spawning. I've attached my first draft of the structure plan for everyone to critique. Please note that these depths are full pond. The water is currently about 2' low. The lowest we have ever seen the water is about 3' below full pond.
I do have a question about the transition areas. I have been reading a lot here and seen that it is recommended to make a structure "highway" for the fish to use to get from the bedding areas to the deeper water. These drops are areas I would expect the bass to use for feeding. As such, I would like to make these areas as fishable as possible. I expect Christmas trees will induce snagging and difficult bait presentation for artificial lures, right? If we do need to make highways to tie the bedding to deep cover, what would you recommend? Something like my bucket shrubs (pic) or would those not be dense enough? I also considered something along the lines of the attached pic but with a netting over each end of the tile to prevent bigger fish from entering. If that is feasible, what size should we try to limit passage to?
We are waiting on a quote for the electofishing but we are definitely going to do that asap. I'm not 100% sure at this point but there is a possibility that the electroshocking will need to wait on warmer water so that a good sample would be obtained in shallower waters. The company who is quoting the job is supposed to let me know the earliest they can/would come out. So this leads me to my stocking question.
As I mentioned before, we have fished and threw the cast net in this lake a lot over the last 2 years. The only fish we have taken with a rod has been green sunfish. I'm almost 100% sure that until I transported bream this year, there was no bream in the pond. I got a call today from a Hatchery I spoke with earlier and they said they could deliver CNBG and RES this weekend or next week. We had gotten a quote for 10,000 @ .30. These are non-graded fish from 2"-5". The owner asked if there would be a downside to going ahead with the stocking of CNBG and RES and structure improvements while waiting on the survey. I told him Mr. Lusk's message said to do electrofishing and structure improvements BEFORE stocking but I wasn't sure of all of the pros/cons on survey first. I couldn't figure out how to post pics on a PM to Mr. Lusk so I thought I would post this here for all to see and comment on. So what are the pros/cons of stocking CNBG and RES now as opposed to waiting until the spring - this is assuming the survey will show we do need these fish.
My thoughts: we know there are at least 10 bass that were stocked this year. 7 stocked on 7/14 and 3 stocked on 11/24. So I'm thinking those would not have spawned in our pond this year. There could possibly be more bass there that we don't know about but again, we have never caught any. So the risk is stocking with predators resulting in loss of investment. Adding structure would help mitigate some of this but should be done before or quickly after stocking. Benefit would be stocking in cold weather when predators don't feed as heavy allowing a few months of growth -slow but hopefully some growth- before the water warms and feeding starts heavy. Is this wrong? Am I totally off track? I know I am working with limited knowledge here so please point me in the right direction.
Thanks again to everyone here and I hope you have a wonderful New Year!
