Pond Boss Forums MANAGING AN EXISTING POND Evaluating and adjusting fish populations Had my pond shock surveyed

I had Nate and Austin from Herman Brothers Pond Management come to my place on Monday and do some shock surveying and analysis. I had a few questions I wanted answered:

1 - as some of you know I'm one of the minority on this site that says you can manage BCP long term in a small(ish) BOW. I wanted confirmation (or not) that my management plan is working.

2 - given my location and the runoff I get into my big pond, I wanted some advice on controlling sediment

3 - I was interested in any other advice Nate and Austin might have

My overall goal for this pond has always been the same - to have a solid fishery primarily focused on good BCP.

After a few hours and some rewiring of the transducer (thanks to some redneck engineering) we got everything I wanted.

The fishery is VERY healthy, with good age classes of LMB, BCP, RES and BG caught. The BCP were especially impressive, and many over 12" were shocked up in a very short period of time.

I should have my report relatively soon and I'll update this post once I get it, but here's a few pics:

Thanks for the post. I guess I will come out of the closet and state I will be adding BCP to my pond this weekend.

LOL....well I'll tell you that I don't regret them one bit. You have to manage the pond for them, there's no doubt about that. For me the management is basically keep the BOW predator and prey heavy - predators to keep the small BCP numbers down and prey so that the growing BCP have plenty to eat. And also take out a nice chunk of 12+" fish every year.

Dale what do you do for the prey part of the equation. I am loaded with 8-1” LMB as well as some hosses that can eat whatever they want . Not seeing any BCP recruitment
8-10” LMB not 8-1”

Dale this is great evidence of a solid fishery management strategy employed - it's new science for the forum which will be helpful for many of us and I'm stoked for your success! Keep harvesting and enjoy those BCP fillets!

Pat,

For me it's been multi-faceted. First and foremost I keep my BG population high...we rarely target them and never during spawn. I want all the little yoy BG I can get in there, as food for my BCP. I also have stocked glass shrimp (very successfully, through nothing but luck on my part), FHM (multiple times via a forage pond) and GSH (not sure how well this worked, shock survey didn't bring up any of these.

I also make sure that at least 30% or so of my BOW has good cover - weed beds etc. It's fairly deep overall so there's always a 'shelf' to fish off of, but this way there's lots of invertebrates and other wiggly things that make good fish food.

Thanks TJ!! Appreciate it. I'd never claim to have it all figured out, and like Nate said while he was here a fishery is ALWAYS changing so it'll take me keeping in front of it over the years, but 10 years in I'm calling it a very successful experiment.

This is the first year where there is plenty of little BG, and more weed . I thought I might need to get rid of some LMB young and let the BCP have more to eat

Pat,

I don't catch a ton of small LMB so I can't speak to that. I think they're just more food for the bigger BCP and obviously also for the larger LMB. I've got a good population of 2-4 LB LMB is what it seems like based on the shock survey, and those boys/girls can put a hurting on small to medium size fish.