Welcome to Pond Boss!

I agree, that is a beautiful pond.

I love the look of having the trees right at the water's edge, especially since our property is in wind-swept Kansas. However, I expect your pond was significantly deeper when it was brand new.

The bald cypress trees that I have drop a lot of those feathery needles and also up to a hundred pounds of those darn round cones from each mature tree. I don't have longleaf pines but my Ponderosa pines also drop a huge litter of needles.

All of that tree material that makes it into your pond is building up your organic muck and robbing the pond of depth. I do like the rim of iris. They should catch some of the needles that are trying to blow into the pond.

Do you ever have a period in the fall where there are a bunch of pine and cypress needles floating on the surface of the pond? Do you ever have floating pine cones and cypress cones? If so, then it might be worth the effort to scoop out some of that debris after a good wind moves it to one shoreline.

Do you have the ability to easily run 120V AC electricity to the edge of the pond? If so, starting an aeration system may help get some healthy bacteria (that require oxygenated water) to start breaking down part of your muck.

I am worried that your LMB are so small because they do not have nearly enough forage. Even if you cull a bunch of stunted bass, the remaining/new bass will need lots of forage to grow rapidly.

I have seen many old ponds like yours and waded in to fish past the prolific plant cover in shallow water. Every single step was in deep muck. In that situation, where the heck do the BG (and the bass) spawn? I know they do, because there are both small BG and small bass in those ponds. However, there is nothing in the pond that could be referred to as "good spawning habitat".

Do you typically have enough water input that it would be easy to drain down the pond as much as 4', and then have it refill reasonably quickly? I am asking because drawing down the water and cleaning the muck from just a few pond slopes with heavy equipment and then adding some sand/gravel might give you a huge payoff in BG production.

Does your family own all of the pond? (It looks like there may be more than one house/cabin on the property.) If not, then it is much more difficult to get approval to spend money on pond improvements. However, the people on the forum in that situation generally have better success if they keep the rest of the owners in the loop during the planning phase.

P.S. Fathead minnows are typically a poor investment in mature ponds. They will be eaten long before they ever get a chance to reproduce, and they add very little weight to your bass for the price.

Good luck on your pond improvements. A pond of that size in LA certainly has the potential to produce some whopping big bass!