Fish In!
The big event happened on March 3rd 2007. I made a 50 mile trip to the little community of Maurice to pick up my fish order. Chris, the hatchery owner, was not in the office, so I looked around. There were ~250gal tanks brimming with fish, and I could have watched them all day. It was better than TV. It's funny how swimming fish can mesmerize people. I think it brings out deep-seated instincts in us. The hatchery grounds were pretty impressive. In addition to the fish breeding ponds, there was a "lunker bass" pond for club members to fish. I bet there were some huge bass in that pond, because it was catch and release only. Chris showed up, and loaded up my bags of fish. For my initial stocking, I ordered 600 BG, 200 RES, and 5# of FHM. The counts looked to be very generous. He even mentioned that the RES count was 250 at the very least. He told me that he slipped a few CBNG into the mix, and wanted to know if that was OK. I told him I appreciated it, and it should be interesting. I don't think there is any down side to a BGXCBNG mix, but hope someone will let me know if there is. I also noticed at least 1 big fat bullfrog tadpole among the mayhem in the bags of bream. I was in a hurry to get them home to keep the stress low, so I kept the rest of the visit short.
As I released the fish into the pond, I noted the BG sizes varied widely. There were perhaps a dozen 5 inchers, 2-3 doz. 4 inchers, perhaps 100 3 inchers, and the rest were 1-2". The RES were much more uniform, and ran very small at about an inch. The FHM were 99% fully grown, and quite fat. The bream were obviously in great condition, and lively. However, they weren't as plump as I would have liked them to be. I saw 3 floater bream and 2-3 woozy ones. The floaters had body damage, so they may have been pinched while being handled. I saw 2 more floater FHM in the next 3-4 days. So I think I was lucky, all things considered. In addition to the 5# of FHM, I have been adding gambusia (G. affinis) from my gully since early January of 2007. I would usually catch 25-50 at a time, but some days I could only catch 10. Since my dip net has a fairly coarse mesh, most of my catch was large pregnant females. At last count I have stocked 420, and they are breeding and thriving. I am seeing way too many 1" gams for them to be the ones I caught, so I suspect they were hatched in my pond over a month ago. I will be stocking LMB and Bcrappie in early June, and I hope by then I will have a bumper crop of gambusia and FHM.
1 week after stocking, I took a hasty dip net survey at points all around the pond. I netted about 50 gambusia, 2 dozen 1/2" crawfish, a dozen bream, and 2 FHM So they have distributed themselves well. I did stock all the fish into 1 area.
Addendum: On March 15th, I went to a friend's lake and dip netted a few ghost shrimp. There were millions of them, but there were too many sticks and roots to use the dip net efficiently. After 3 hours of hard work, I brought home only ~150 shrimp. They ran from 3/4" long to the fully mature size of nearly 2". On the positive side, most of the larger ones were carrying eggs, so there should be plenty of them by the time I stock bass and crappie in early June. As far as I know, there is no downside to ghost shrimp, providing you have cover for them. I think they are vastly under rated as a secondary forage species. I also picked up about 200 gambusia and few dozen other critters, including spring peepers and dragonfly nymphs. The stocked gambusia count is now around 600, and that's all I need. I wish I had another 1000 ghost shrimp, but catching them is too much like work!
Addendum #2: Another dip net survey taken March 18 revealed that my bream have the "big head thin body look of death" syndrome. I ran to Wal-Mart and grabbed 10# of 33% protein food and fed heavily every day so far. I will continue to do so as long as they look puny.
=-=-=-=-=-
Building a pond the hard way was, well, hard. Please don't try this at home unless you are totally obsessed. But who knows, you may get lucky!
It's been fun. Thanks for all the questions and nice comments.
Spring peeper... a tiny, lively little frog.
Grass or ghost shrimp. Great forage, great bait.
Picture credits: NOAA
