Pond Boss Forums POND CONSTRUCTION Creating habitat New pond habitat

I'm very new here and have a ton of questions.

I have a pond a little bigger than 1/2 acre. It is up to 11 feet deep with a very little under 2 feet deep, there is a high percentage of 8 to 3 feet water. I am in the central valley of California just north of Fresno. We get 100 degree plus temps and about 12" of rainfall a year. The pond is feed by well water.

I want a pond that is fun for the kids to catch panfish, has some 3+ pound CC and an occasional 3+ pound lmb.

The pond has 5,000 Rosy reds, 215 3-5" black crappie and 15 lmb 7-10". I will be adding 200 3-5" RES, 200 3-5" BG, some crawdads and more feeder minnows soon. I also will add some CC in a few months.

The pond has two full size pecan trees, many pieces of 1 1/2' to 1/2" pipe (concrete and plastic), two floating logs, 5 X-mas trees (some suspended, some sunk along the shore), various sized tires from 7' to 2' diameter, concrete rip rap, and various sizes of round and crushed rock.

I want to try to get the panfish to spawn this year so what else should I add? I have plenty of sand/gravel available and more X-mas trees. I hope I am not asking too many questions on too many paces here. Let me know if I am.

Thanks for the help.

Wow mtalley! Registered 2 days and already a lunker, welcome!

With <3 years pond experiance, I don't know how much help I can be, but I'll take a SWAG at it. I love to catch crappie but in a pond of .5 acres you've got a problem. Everything else stocked is great for what your goals are. You could add up to 100 8-10" CC if you add feed as well, and have 3lb plus fish in under 2 years.

For you're relatively small pond you sound like you may have more than enough structure. Too much structure and the yoy won't be eaten and you will end up having your biomass of fish all under 3", which may well happen anyway due to the crappie.

If it were me, I would catch all the crappie I could ASAP! If you haven't added the bream yet you may want to consider draining the pond. The cost of losing the crappie and replacing the minnows will be a whole lot cheaper than dealing with the problems the crappie will cause very soon. You simply have way too many crappie for this pond. Recomendations for ponds to have crappie vary from 5 to 100 acres in size, but most now say NO crappie in ponds under 50 acres to avoid problems.

My 2 cents and I am sure others will chime in on this soon.

On a personal note....How far are you from Lemore Naval Air Station? I have a daughter and 2 grandkids stationed there with thier sailor.

Does lunker mean I have a bid mouth?

Dang that is not what I wanted to hear about The crappie. Do they just feed to heavily on the forage?

Lemoore is only about a hour south of here, pretty darn close.

Mt there is much debate on stocking crappie in small ponds. Here is one that focuses more on Black Crappie in a smaller pond. It seems as though stunting can occur if you do not develop and maintain a good harvest strategy. If you search on Crappie you will find a ton of discussion about them although much of it was related to White Crappie. Of course many of us defy conventional wisdom and try to maintain ponds with fish that are considered undesirable according to general consensus. DIED and I for example love our much maligned Green Sunfish.

Here's a link for some more info (not all the links within this link work but is has some great info in it):

Pond Boss black crappie discussion

On the bright side, those 8"-10" LMB are probably eating some of the 3"-5" Crappie.

mt, please keep us posted on what you decide with the crappie. I know that virtually all the advice is against BC, but I would still like to add them to my pond in about 3 years once the LMB are big and plentiful enough to control them.

I sure hope yours is the rare small pond that can sustain crappie. It won't be long before you'll find out if they are going to be uncontrolable after they spawn.

Thanks for the info Jeff. I'll keep you posted Rainman, I am looking forward to the spawn.

MT...see what happens, I guess, if you don't want to start over. One thing, crappie should never be "C&R" fish. If you catch them...clean them. Course, I feel the same about female BG. They're either cleaned or composted.

Plenty of fishing pressure will help keep crappie big and far between.

I think I read here in the forums that you only want 15-20% maximum cover in a pond, why is this?

Thanks

i think primarily for healthy predator prey relationships. too much vegetation, too many prey survive, predator health declines, to little vegetation, prey cant survive, predators do well until prey is all eaten up....i'm sure it could be said much more eloquently but this is how i understand it.

other icing on cake is fishibility, water quality, oxygen demand.....too much vegetation obviously adversely affects these things.