Pond Boss Forums MANAGING AN EXISTING POND Evaluating and adjusting fish populations Fish Traps for Bluegill?

I am looking for ways to gather bluegill from ponds to stock them in my 100 acre lake. I simply cannot afford the 10's of thousands of dollars it would cost to buy fingerling bluegill or enough big adults for the lake. Other than rod and reel or net seining, are fish traps and effective way to catch small bluegill in big numbers? If so what type of trap, best baits for th traps and where to buy the traps? Thanks all!

Dave

David, A lot of supply houses sell fish traps. For bluegill , bait them with about anything. However, enough to make a difference on a 100 acre lake is a huge trapping project.

good luck,my brother had the same problem with a 20 acre lake,we never could catch enough bream to even know you added them.why dont you come to the south and by your bream were they are alot cheeper and drive them back.in my market bream cost 62 cents each,thats alot better than your 1.50 price.

David I would think about what you said in your other post. Your talking about stocking 25,000 bluegill! Trapping and releasing that many bluegill would be a daunting task for even a team of people helping you. Depending on what your funds are you may be able to build an adjacent forage pond and stock it with bluegill. That would be alot easier than transporting them everywhere. I'm not sure the exact numbers bluegill typically spawn at, but I'm sure you could get several good spawns per year in Cal. This may be a project that takes alot of time. So maybe a couple small forage ponds(less than an acre) and culling skinny bass might slowly get the fishery back on track.

I tried the trapping deal. It was not as easy as I thought it would be. Very very time consuming.
Did I help my pond ? Probably a little bit.
Would I do it again ? No.

I like the adjacent forage pond idea. I have a pond that is little enough to throw my cast net across when half full. Twice now I have put in about 5 small adult bluegill in the spring and by the time the pond goes dry in August I have pulld out at least a thousand fingerlings. Remember you are adding bluegill to the pond at the same time thinning the bass so that the bluegill in the lake have a higher survival rate too. That should turn things around.
If you build a forage pond close enough you can pump water from the lake into it and keep it full.

One word.......cast net......oops thats two, or is it. Another word.....private water.....dang thats two also......I know here in FL, if I spent 3 hours a day visiting the various private ponds, with permission, overloaded with bluegill, for the better part of the summer, evenings/weekends, I would easily be able to catch 25000 bg fingerlings.
Toby
Ok....it wouldn't be easy but at a $1.00+ each it would be worth it.

DavidB, unless you have an overabundance of predators, wouldn't it be reasonable to stock one hundred or so bluegill and depend on their reproductive ability to do the job? With each female producing between 2,000 and 63,000 eggs, it would seem that you wouldn't have a lasting shortage of bluegill.

Thanks for the advice guys - you all are a great help!

What do you think about the idea of netting off a small cove, say with the max depth of the net in 3'? I would of course spook out all the bass and channel cats first and then deploy the net. Next I'd plant 500 or so bluegill and then come this fall, remove the net and all the bluegill? We could also feed the bluegill with pellets (if so what pellets would be the best for me to buy and how many pounds and how many times a day?).

As anyone done this here? This might be easier than building another pond next to the lake. I have seen seine nets sold for pretty good prices.

Thanks!!

Dave

You ain't got a prayer of spooking all of the predators out of a cove. That would be like locking a fox up in the henhouse.

I like forage ponds. There is no way to slow down BG sex drive when there are no predators around.