Well, the ice is all gone, temps are on the rise. The trout are starting to feed, and showing good surface activity. So I tried a little spinner after I got home from work today, and third cast I got this nice Brown shown below. Thanks to my Grandma fishing with me since I was a toddler, I can clean a trout ready for frying in under a minute. Which is what I did, and the thing was nothing but bones twenty minutes later.
I'm also including some pics of how I finished the edge of the pond. You'll also see the air compressor housing for bottom-diffuser aeration.
I used the field stones that are readily available. My Kubota L4310 and lots of summer saturdays and presto. I also added some pavers, to make a nice walkway between a large open firepit on one end and a covered pagoda on the other. The field stones go down to about three feet below the pond surface.
I built a step-down area from the walkway for fishing. And also put a big rock one small leap out from the edge-also for fishing. You see a nasty predator cormorant on that rock, so obviously it knew that it was a fishing rock.
I have a river nearby where I pump water to both a waterfall (not shown well) and also impact sprinklers to break up surface tension and clean up the surface of the water during hot summer days. The high-impact sprinkler heads are on the edge, but face over the pond. When dust and debris gather on the water, this cleans it up real nice. One of them is behind the fishing rock in the above photo.
I thought some of you may get some ideas from what I've done.
I'll leave you with this pic I took below. This is how I feel sometimes. Everything looks okay in front of me, but I'm making no progress, my feet just won't move, and I get this gnawing feeling in the pit of my stomach...
