Thanks for the help. I was typing as your harvest comment came through. I didn't think there would be any issue there. I built a holding tank so that I can keep fish during the week and filet them all at the end of the week. Would you suggest keeping all bass or only the 11's? Right now I have a couple of 8" fish in there.
Conventional wisdom here says that once a LMB is stunted, it will never grow to it's full potential due to lost years of growth over a finite life span. This is one reason there's an allure to nuking the whole pond and starting over. However, if you get super aggressive, and cull 400+ more LMB in that 11" +/- range, along with adding some new pellet trained LMB, I think you could get things turned around.
Now, and this is kind of a question...if those 11" stunted LMB spawn with themselves, or with new potential LMB, is the off-spring genetically challenged, growth wise? I don't think it's too much of a concern. Still though, you have to get those stunted LMB numbers way, way down. So, I would say cull all LMB that were already existing in the pond, unless you catch one that looks much, much more healthy than the rest; those, I might leave in. For that, you'd be looking for 'fat' fish with high Relative Weights (ratio of weight vs. length).
