Ok, I have not been sitting on my hands, I actually left the property yesterday seeking some help as you folks have suggested. My wife took me to several outlying towns, in what we thought were most likely under our area of responsibility for the Department of Natural Resources, DOA, and any others we though could help.
As it turns out, we hit every town but the appropriate one for our area, however, they were very helpful and discovered that there are no people in our area that have any experience or relationship with ponds, at least close by, however, there is a person they gave me the number of that I will speak to today that is located about 60 miles away. In some cases they will even come out and test the water for you, although I do not know what the conditions for that are yet. I have no problems with sending it off to be tested, but locally they may have some information to this area that could be of benefit to me. Geeze, ANY information will be of benefit to me! As an example of what I am up against locally, we stopped and inquired about alum in three different major ( well, the largest in these towns anyway ) feed/farming supply just in case. Not only did we draw a blank and would not be able to even order it from any of them, two of the places had no idea what alum is. I LOVE small towns , and have never been able to live in a city, but when they get real small, sometimes you gotta give a little
Additionally, on the chance I am overfeeding I have cut the amount I am feeding by 2/3. I still have no way of knowing if I am overfeeding or not, and the 15 minute rule, as I have stated before, is kinda off the table here since they wipe it out in a flurry in the first 3 minutes or so. However, the vast majority of that Aquamax is being gobbled down by the CC anyway, and since I need to get the large fish out as has been pointed out to me, no point in making them even bigger ( which Aquamax seems to do rather fast compared to the normal catfish food ) and even tougher to get out of the pond. I suppose one downside to this tactic is that if they are still very hungry they may work over the BG population pretty hard.
I have put up a bunch of photos and 2 short videos of the ponds on Photobucket, and I have what is SUPPOSED to be a direct link to them. However, it may or may not work, I have only used this site one time long ago and I really have no idea what I am doing ( don't say it ..
so if the pictures cannot be accessed for the link, PLEASE let me know right away so I can go back in and figure out how to make it right. The photos do show how green it is, but I was unable to really show the size, and that is where the videos will help. They are not big, the larger pond is just a click short of 100 yards long, but all kinds of width, mostly over 6' deep, smaller pond is only about a 45 yard circle, not as deep.
The pond (S) are as green as the trees. I incorrectly noted that the tree stump was only 2" under the water in one video, but that was wrong, it is 4" under to the top of the tree stump. I think you can see how faded it is for being that shallow, as well as the algae covering it as well. It is a small cut tree, should show up pretty well at such a short depth. Also, as you can see in the videos and the pictures, I was still adding water from the well, and this was the end ( I shut it off right after I finished the video ) of a 7 day run, so the pond had an addition 300,000 gallons of water in it, which always helps the clarity for a short time a bit.
I hope this works, it took the old gal ( my PC, not my wife
over 3 hours to upload the two videos. They are all there, so if this link does not work and you cannot see all the pics and the two videos, please let me know ASAP and I will figure something out. Thanks again for all your assistance and patience, I am following up on everything that I was instructed. I will call Shawn the minute I know the pics are up so he can see what I am talking about.
Hey, how bout this post!! One you can actually read and not have to shave, eat a few meals and catch a few winks before you are able to finish it!!
http://photobucket.com/catbird84
