I went fishing tonight with a 3" BG, hoping to target our last adult LMB (which is extremely hook-shy).

For those who aren't familiar, our pond has 1 remaining LMB at about 11-12", another LMB at about 5.5", but otherwise just BG and some YP that we stocked a month ago at 6-8". We'd ideally like to get the remaining LMB out, and experiment with a predominantly YP/BG pond.

I've seen noted many times on these forums that YP can't eat a BG bigger than about 2", so I thought I was safe using a 3" BG to target only the LMB, especially given that our YP are smaller adults.

Well, on the third cast, something smashed the 3" BG quite hard, and put up a bit of a fight, so I was really pumped up to finally see our 11-12" LMB come out of the water, and......

it was a quite fat YP that I estimated at about 8.5" (using my hand as a measuring stick).

I don't dispute that fusiform, soft-rayed forage such as minnows or shiners are much better YP forage and that if a person is shooting for trophy YP, that would be optimal, but now this made me believe that maybe BG as YP forage isn't such a horrible idea for us specifically, given our small pond with almost no cover and that we're aiming for higher numbers of medium-sized panfish for harvest (not trophies of either YP or BG).