Hello folks, I've been lurking on here for a while now and decided to finally get some more insight into a little side project that a co-worker and I have been working on. We've been given permission to stock an already-established 16-acre pond in central North Carolina. The pond is one of the amenities at a local housing community and is stocked annually with channel catfish, bluegill and largemouth bass. The issue with this pond is that everything is SMALL. My hunch is that it's overstocked and underfished and there's no real predators to control the population of the smaller fish. I hardly see anyone fishing in it either. Most of bass are less than 1 pound and the average catfish is maybe a half-pound. You can literally toss out your line and reel in these tiny catfish all day long. There are a few lurking carp as well (common carp) that are also very small.

About the pond:

Like I said, it's roughly 16 acres in size with a small creek flowing into the north end of it and a dam at the southern end. Average depth is 5' with the deepest part by the dam being 10' (wish it was deeper). There are 3 fountains in 3 different spots on the pond that run during the day.

Goals:

We want to make it a strict catfish and crappie pond (for food and for sport). I'm well aware of the drawbacks of stocking crappie but since we're disregarding the LMB aspect of the pond, I think the crappie might be a good idea. Currently, there are only channel cats in here but we want to add blue cats. We will be bucket stocking everything, so this is definitely a long-term project. I would absolutely be thrilled if we could get the blue cats to breed but I know that may be difficult. With the flowing creek into the lake and the water being moved by the dam and the fountains, I'm hoping we can make this happen. If blue cats aren't a good idea, I'd really just like the channel cats to be bigger. We've already been removing the tiny ones as we catch them and turning them into fish food so they don't go to waste. I also don't think there's any shad in this pond so that might be an issue as well? I don't know how well they would do in this size of BOW but I'd like recommendations on that as well. I'd be willing to spend a little money on stocking it with bait if it came to that.

Any thoughts and/or input on our project would be welcomed.


"In the age of information, ignorance is a choice." - Donny Miller