Thanks for sharing your goals and we are rooting for you with your kidney issues, nerve issues and the vision troubles to continue to enjoy this process of planning and stocking your pond. Wow dealing with the fallout from cancer sounds horrible and yet you sound very determined to carry on. Congrats and carry on with determination!

I don't have CC or any other fish in the catfish family in my pond so i can't speak to the pros and cons except for that almost everyone I read about has a management issue with either too many CC to catch or not enough food for them in their forage base. Some have the added problem in large bodies of water that they were SUPPOSSED to not reproduce but they found a way to do it anyway. I guess if you want to catch a few catfish for the frying pan and you stock 25 or so for fun and see what happens you could but I would stay away from 100s of catfish in your initial stocking.

If your top predator is LMB then you again are going to want to put WAY less than the folks at the county want to give you. Think again about what esshup said about the huge amount of baitfish/forage it takes to feed those LMB. That is why if you have a long enough season for Tilapia to reproduce 2 or 3 times in a summer then that produces lots of young fish for your hungry LMB. Otherwise you have to hope you have enough BG and enough spawns per year with survival of the young BG to feed the bass.

Remember also that the LMB are pretty good at having successful spawns of their own and they can produce thousands of their own offspring. I can't speak to how many LMB you can support as your pond is large.

We all agree that RES or shellcrackers are a wise addition and less likely to get out of control or get stunted due to lack of food. Can you source them easily?

Maybe fellow forum member snipe can give advice on using walleye vs a hybrid walleye option when a pond is brand new or maybe wait a season and then add some bonus predators.

if you are allowed hybrid striped bass they can be a ton of fun for kids to catch, easy to source, and good to eat. That might be your bonus predator that also won't compete too much for forage, readily takes pellet food, and you can control numbers since they rarely reproduce in ponds.

Many of us thought we would enjoy a LMB for the predator and bluegill/shellcracker/crappie as the mid level. However almost everyone struggles with the balancing of this setup and either have hundreds of stunted skinny bass or stunted bluegill.

I'm not sure how Small mouth would do in the weather conditions in your exact location but many midwest pond owners are starting a new trend of using SMB, YP and Walleye to be their top level predators, purposely avoiding LMB, avoiding CC, avoiding both northern and hybrid bluegill due to those balance issues. Then the panfish that kids get to catch become the YP (they also take to pellets) and perhaps in your case RES (shellcracker) It would be really neat to see if you could source long ear sunfish (fun to catch, GORGEOUS to see) as a bonus panfish. The Walleye can really clean up on the young perch to control their numbers. The SMB will help with the RES numbers. If you want more fishing excitement and variety add in the hybrid stripers as well.

If SMB won't do well in your waters I think Walleye, YP, Hybrid stripers and carefully selected panfish could work.

I have no experience with crappie, white black or hybrid. Someone else can help you there. Some of the worry about crappie spawning first and taking over the bluegill position is less of a concern if you don't want or have bluegill or hybrid bluegill in the pond anyway. The bluegill vs crappie issue is critical only in ponds where you are trying to keep the LMB fed. If you don't have LMB or bluegill to worry about then it is just a matter of how many crappie will you have in a few years and who will be eating the crappie to keep their numbers in check.