Pond Boss Forums MANAGING AN EXISTING POND Evaluating and adjusting fish populations Bass, Channel cats and mud cats

What is the shape of the body of water? Are you able to seine it to move the fish to one area to get the undesirables out and leave the rest in?

You may have plenty of forage fish for your predators - you say that the water boils around your 3 feeders when they go off.

What size catfish are you getting? 300 lbs may be too many especially if they are 4" fingerlings.

Also, do you have both structure and cover in your pond? A place where predator fish can set up to pick off forage fish?

In addition to stocking you may want to consider building out habitats for forage fish to congregate in, and areas with cover and structure for predator fish to prey upon forage fish. These will give you target fishing areas.

Thanks TGW1. Looks like the end of January is good time then. that's great.

its about 8 acres and not seineable. we tried to do that in the small end and didn't come up with anything good. its several hundred feet wide and about 1000 feet long.

Yes the there a ton of BG hitting the feed when the feeders good off. the CC I am supposed to be getting are 1 pounders but I am guessing they will be slight smaller. you know how it goes. :-) at least that's what I'm paying for LOL

I put in 5 large brush piles near the feeders to help with habitat but honestly that is when I had the hardest time catching them. Before I put that in we had only 2 spots for structure and we always had good luck. when we put in the additional brush piles and beefed the 2 existing ones we couldn't catch a thing. again maybe there are fat and happy, have lock jaw or dead. Or I just suck and fishing which is entirely possible. :-) but I doubt that. we've always had good luck in the past.

Based on the bubblers and feeding how many pounds of fish can my pound hold anyway? is there a certain formula of pounds per acre that can be used?

I'm stocking the CC's and bass on Tuesday. Hopefully I'll have some good luck this summer. Thanks for all the advice. I'll post some pics if y'all are interested.

Happy fishing man! Pics would be great!

UPDATE

stocking went great and we caught bass CC's all weekend. All of them fat and happy 😄.

Couple of interesting things though. Very few fish eating at the feeders. I expected allot of BG feeding at the very least but had little to nothing feeding. Very weird. I had them going off 4 times a day for 1 second for the last 3 weeks. Water temp was still a little cool but in the high 50's so I expected allot more. Is this usual for the BG to find the feeders again after the winter? Also I would think the pellet trained bass I put in would have been eating but only a few were. Any ideas here?

Another strange thing is I found at least 20-30 6" bull head cats floating at the shore line with back half of there bodies almost skinned off. Almost like they were used like a Popsicle, sucked on and dumped. None of them had any bites taken out of them. I first thought it was otters but they take bites out of fish and none of these had bites taken out of them. Any ideas?

C-12345,
Is there any way that you can post some pics of the skinned up catfish?

I will try and get one tomorrow. One of my friends thinks it my be cormorants or the CC's what do you think. I did have a lot of cormorants this year.