Welcome Boondoogle!

I love the stone in your pond. I am jealous because I am too far west in Kansas to have any local limestone quarries.

Yes YP are delicious for humans to eat, AND easier for LMB to swallow. However, they are difficult to use as a long-term forage species in a pond for trophy LMB. They just are not prolific enough, and the BG will eat the fry and small YP, the small bass will eat the medium YP, and the large LMB will eat the largest YP. Eventually you may not have enough brood stock remaining.

Almost every single pond for trophy LMB that I have heard of uses BG as the backbone of the food supply. They are just so prolific and the wider-shaped BG can escape some of the smaller bass, so you eventually have a food source that can grow large enough to feed your 7-9# bass!

When I started reading PB, I thought you could just design your perfect fish population and manage your pond based on your goals - and just keep your pond at that optimal point. Instead, even our most expert managers are constantly tweaking their ponds and frequently settling for what the pond will actually give them. Your pond will never be constant, and your fish population will always be a moving target.

That being said, perhaps you could start out with FHM and YP (and perhaps RES). Get those started this spring and give the YP a year head start, and then do BG in Year 2 and LMB in Year 3. That way you might have an awesome YP fishery for a few years. Your LMB population, while introduced late, would probably show phenomenal growth. Might reach your trophy goals that way?

You are also right about the GSH showing traits of both predator and prey. Their predator part might allow GSH to interfere with some management plans for certain top predator species. However, many of the Pond Boss people with LARGE bass also have GSH in their ponds. Having a large forage species in addition to the BG seems to be a benefit. (Once your LMB population is well-established, most of the GSH people say you have to have some heavy plant cover in at least a few places in the pond to keep a reproducing GSH population.)

Are you considering a supplemental feeder for your big bass goals? Feeding pellets directly to the bass is a big growth enhancer. Or, feeding pellets to your BG is an indirect growth enhancer to your bass.

Finally, with your rip rap shorelines and stone cover in shallow water, have you considered adding any crayfish? In my experience fishing rocky lakes in eastern Kansas, there are times in the spring where every bass we caught had crayfish feelers sticking up out of their craws. The crayfish will not feed your biggest bass, but the small and medium bass will grow quickly on that "extra" forage if you can get a good population established in your pond.

I am just throwing out some non-expert ideas while you are still in the planning stages. Hopefully some of our actual experts will drop into your thread.

Good luck developing your new pond. It looks like it is going to be a beauty AND an awesome fishery!