I agree with ewest.
You have the perfect opportunity to do some selection of only the best to transfer. If you read through my sediment pond thread you will see that it started out new and clean of fish. The CNGB in that pond grew like gangbusters. Your very best growth will come out of your initial stocking, then as the fish reproduce you can run into the problem of over population and subsequent generations never grow quite as well as the original. That is because that first generation has the entire pond as its resource with little competetion.
If you truly want a trophy CNBG pond in your big pond you have the opportunity to grow your original stocked fish up large enough to trap/seine/catch fish of sufficient size so you can see the quality of their growth. Then transfer those very best fish to your main pond. Leave the laggards in the grow-out pond or better yet just destroy them. That is difficult to do once a person has paid good money for a fish (I can't do it, but trophies are not my goal), but if trophy is truly your goal it is better to have only the fish with best potential to get to trophy status in the pond you are trying to get trophys.
Now if you are going for just good all around fishing with a good catch rate, that could be a different story. But if you truly want trophies you want a very limited number of exceptional fish with all the resources in the way of feed and growth opportunity you can offer. If you could raise them to a size large enough to determine gender, you could even try for a male only pond by selecting only males to transfer, although one mistake and that goal will be gone. But still, even if you get 80% correct males, those initial fish stocked in that pond will have a better opportunity of reaching trophy status.
Ramblings of a non-expert. Use information at your own risk.
Last edited by snrub; 03/21/18 10:37 AM.
