Our pond area is a little over 5 acres with about 4 acres of water and the rest in the form of 8 islands. Since it has a good clay base, we could make a tremendous amound of bottom structure.
There is a company nearby that makes concrete blocks and have given us over 125 pallets of defective blocks. We put about 25 pallets of these blocks around a covered bridge and spread the rest around the lake. Our most common way of using them is the make a reef starting at the bank going out to deep water with about 10 pallets of blocks. These blocks are reasonably easy to handle and provide a tremendous amount of holes and small places for small fish, crayfish etc. to hide.
We have largemouths, smallmouths, white bass, wipers, rock bass, walleyes, yellow perch, channel catfish, bluegills, white and black crappie, pumkinseeds, green sunfish, freshwater drum, goldeyes and shorthead redhorse. After talking with Dr. Willis, I will add white suckers as an additional forage species.
All of these species do just fine together. What they do not do is reproduce well in the presence of all this competition or in this situation. That means we have to add fish as their form of reproduction.
TyW33 talked about having smallmouths as the sole predator. That might be OK as long as there aren't any bluegills, sunfish, crappie or rock bass in the lake. Dr. Willis can comment on this better than I but I don't think that smallmouths can controll the numbers of this shape of fish. Actually, most predators find it easier to eat a yellow perch shaped fish. Once you have bluegill shaped fish, I think you are committed to largemouths.
Dr. Willis is right, I think that any tubular shaped fish that is stocked under 8 inches is just expensive forage. That really is the problem with stocking smallmouths. It takes at least two years to get them that big which makes them expensive ($3-$5 dollars each in our area). I'm making a grow out pond just to provide a ready suppy of smallmouths. Realisticly, a person could just block off a part of their lake with netting to make a grow out pond.
If you have never caught smallmouths before, you can't believe how much harder they fight than largemouths. Smallmouths, wipers and goldeyes are tier 1 in fighting ability while largemouths are tier 2 fighters in my opinion.
