Hello everyone, sorry to bring up an old topic but im adding to this because this thread is basically my blog of my pond if you will. But feel free to comment if you wish!
Today we conducted first shock survey and results were encouraging.
First from my last post till now has been uneventful for the pond. It was very very low in 2011 and such a hot and dry year I didnt even fish it.
Now to the survey results! we caught around 30 bass from 10-20 iches. The largest was just under 6lbs and over 19 inches. When the report comes back I will have his exact measurements and RW. We caught one fish longer at 20 inch but was not as heavy. Remember bass were added June 11 2009 from overton at about 2inch. 100flas and 100f1. with a heavy 30+:1 stocking of CNBG to BASS. I was hoping to see a few bigger but I understand electro fishing is just a sample. Also two fish just escaped the electricity and could very well have been bigger than anything we caught! (gotta have a one that got away story
A few interesting notes, fish were mainly caught in 3 areas, the areas that also happen to have the best structure in the pond. Golden Shiner population of 3-4 inch fish is outrageous, probably higher than most people would like. Also very few CNBG and RES were sampled, but with such a great RW's seen there has to be plenty in the pond. This is also confirmed by cast net. Tilapia were also stocked this summer, and have grown well, only two were sampled today tho, one in the mouth of the large fish, and another in the 5-6inch range. Another cause for the poor sampling of bait fish was the fact that the pond was very low and much of it was not accessible to the electro boat. He also harvested about 6 fish and pulled otiliths (spell check?) and the report will let me know if some "borderline" fish were runts from last year, or exceptional fish from this year.
One more interesting observation I had was that the bass in the 16inch range all seemed to have very small mouths compared to their length and weight. I hope this is a sign of a fish that is growing very fast.
I have now also confirmed at least two spawns of bass, which would be correct I guess if the bass were added as yoy in June 2009
I will try to post a picture tomorrow of the large fish. I look forward to fishing the pond now that I know where the big fish hang! I will also post again when my full report comes back and I read what it has to say. Although he already said the fish were exceptional and the report will more focus on the need for more structure and aquatic vegetation. We also discussed the idea of a CNBG "feeder" pond that only purpose would be to grow CNBG over winter to add to the pond come spring.
I would like to thank everyone here on pondboss that has helped me with this project so far! I think it is coming along well. I am still in a relentless pursuit of that double digit bass!.
