Hello All,

My name is Luke and I have been reading and gleaning a lot of valuable information from this site over the last year or so. I would like to thank everyone for all the great advice given here.

I have a one acre pond in NE Iowa. It was dug last year and fed by some run off and springs from the hill. The pond is lined with blue clay and holds water great. The pond filled all the way in early spring and has remained at full pool all summer with water flowing through the overflow pipe. The pond itself is a max depth of 20ft and average of 12ft. I have 2 bottom diffuser aerators going 24/7. The pond also has good structure and a beach/swimming area.

In the fall of last year at 1/2 pool I stocked 5 gallon fathead minnows. This spring at full pool I stocked 1000 HBG, 200CC, and 200LMB and 5 gallon more minnows. I feed a high quality food once a day as much as they will eat in 10 minutes.

I have a lot of the LMB and CC and HBG eating every evening. From reading on here I am thinking I may be a little heavy on the CC and LMB. My young sons and I have fished this 3 times. We catch a lot of healthy fat appearing bass in the 7-9 inch range, a lot of HBG in the 5-6 inch range. We caught 2 CC and these were both 11 inches and healthy

My question is should I start to remove some of the bass before winter? There just seems to be so many of them and am worried about stunting and them taking some biomass away from the other fish in the pond.

Goals for the pond are good fishing/swimming for me and my 2 young sons with large HBG and to use the LMB to control the population so there is no recruitment. I also like to catch and eat the CC so we will be taking these out when they are in the 1-2 lb range.