That's nice Hollywood. Your dad looks cooooold with that Rudolph nose and cheeks and chin. LOL Wow nice deerstand!
I hope you don't mind but I included your PM to me asking about trout and trout ponds below to share with others.
I saw your post about brookies in your .10 acre pond & was wondering- do they reproduce?
No they don't reproduce. I plant all males if I can, anyway, as that is what the taxidermists that are my customers of trophy size brook trout want.
I have been purchasing 6 to 10 inch trout from a supplier in Michigan. I have found a source for triploid and diploid eggs of brook, brown, rainbow, and tiger trout and at some point will probably hatch my own for lots of reasons.
Do you feed them or does the pond generate enough food?
I feed the floating pellets. Since my pond is only 1/10th acre and I have over 100 2 t 3 lb. brook trout in there, there is no way there would be enough natural feed. They'll be 4 to 6 lbs. this time next year.
I have a new pond of about the same size- pics in the thread "leaking badly" in the pond construction section. There is a good flow of spring water through this pond- brookies are my favorite but I had been leaning towards rainbows due to concern about the temps being too high in the summer. How warm does your pond get? The spring that flows into mine stays cool- but the summer flow is only maybe 15 gallons per minute.
If it's too warm for brooks it's probably too warm for rainbows. Browns are the best at marginal water conditions.
You may be still be able to do it with 15 gallons a minute in a 1/10th acre pond if your banks are steep and you stay conservative on the number of trout. By summer you wouldn't want to run your diffuser in the daytime, and maybe even less than that to keep from warming up the pond by mixing surface warm water with the deeper cold water.
You might want to consider gravity dropping your spring water to aerate it and feeding it into the bottom of the pond without using a diffuser to mix the water column in the summer.
