I am not a big fan of pond dye either but did use a small amount on my pond at ice out this spring. I have milfoil in my pond and had 9ft of visibility at ice out this spring with small patches of milfoil starting to grow on the bottom in 9ft of water this spring. A used conservative amount of pond dye to reduce the the water clarity down to 36"-42" and the resulting slow die off of the deeper milfoil triggered an algae bloom which further reduced the water clarity. Basically I steered the nutrient load towards a bloom before the milfoil could utilize most of the available nutrients. Use too much pond dye though and you are right, you won't have a good bloom.

As far as the GC go we stocked 70 triploids in my dad's old 10 acre pond to work on the milfoil and they never did make bit a difference in the amount of milfoil present. We ended up chemically treating his pond every year once the water temps warmed up enough, by then it was a mess, milfoil starts actively growing in cold water temperatures too. My experience with GC is either you have too many of them and no weeds, or not enough of them to make a difference. A smaller body of water might be different.

Years ago when I fished Smithville in MO they had put up wire cages in many areas to protect the aquatic vegetation from GC, the non-triploid GC had stripped the lake bare of aquatic vegetation and it was having a negative effect on fish populations at the lake.

Personally I think aquatic vegetation is some of the best fish habitat there is but like with a lot things having too much can be a bad thing.

Last edited by Shorty; 05/24/13 04:24 PM.