I would like to send out a big THANK YOU to Travis for meeting with me on the Potomac yesterday and helping me collect some banded killifish and tesselated darters, who would have thought that running a seign through snake infested waters could be so much fun!! We ended up with about 50 killifish and 20 darters for my pond to go along with 20 easter silvery minnows that he put in his forage pond.

After returning home with my catch in an oxygenated cooler I brought the family down to the farm to release our newest forage fish. I had also ordered more eelgrass to stock as the last crop did not seem to catch on (I planted them in 1" of water as the pond was still 15" from full pool and I don't think they survived loing enough to be fully submerged). The wife and I planted all 50 corkscrew eelgrass plants, these were much larger than the last batch I stocked and I am very confident they will take hold. The killifish and darters were acclimated for almost an hour as we planted the eelgrass, when I tipped over the cooler they took off like bats outta hell!

The pond is now at full pool and there are fathead minnows EVERYWHERE!!! The tadpoles that dominated the shoreline a few weeks ago are much sparser now, in there place are thousands of fatheads of various sizes.

Some of the hybrid lillies I planted last month appear to have established a foothold, they are not spreading but they have pads on the surface and appear to be very much alive. Unfortunately a 6-8" copperhead was seen swimming near the pads.

My wife is an expert crayfish hunter and she noticed dozens of small crayfish along the shoreline and a few larger ones eating dead fatheads.

I did not see many of the golden shiners/spotfin shiners/bluntnose minnows/greenfin shiners/grass shrimp but when I went out to the end of the dock and threw out some AM600 into the middle of the pond the shiners appeared along with bluntnose minnows and larger fatheads. The shiners and bluntnose minnows would school under the feed just out of sight and individual fish would scream up from the school to hit pellets then swim back down with their quarry where other shiners/minnows would help them break it apart.

Before feeding the fish I decided to take a plunge off the dock and the water was nice and warm until you got below 6' where the thermocline kept the water 20-30 degrees cooler. This will be a heck of a swimmin hole! My Wife and Father were on the dock and saw millions of fish scream towards the dock when I dove in.

I saw 30+ fish holding to each of my CD structures. They were 1-1.5" long and appeared to have a blue streak on their side. I am hoping they are spotfin or greenfin offspring as all the spotfin/greenfins I stocked were larger than these.

Unfortunately my phone's battery died so I did not get any pictures but I am going up on Wednesday to meet with David Beasley of Solitude Lake Management to get 100 redears stocked and to get some water samples taken to ensure I have the right alkalinity/dissolved oxygen/hardness/conductivity etc. and I will get some photos then.