We had unusually cold days and nights. We have had heavy cold rain and some cold spells. Not much sunlight. But still no perch ribbons. Must be no perch left in the pond. I'm thinking this year is a good time to focus on adding structure and building forage options again. Would love to find time to find/net some local mudminnows or BNM for another starter forage species.
My daughter is still catching some jumbo leftover golden shiners from the original stocking around 10 yrs ago with hook and corn bait.
Still struggling to get the remaining unwanted jumbo goldfish out as they have become quite hookshy. I was hoping not to have to use the selective -carpicidal chemical treatment, but if they can't be netted or caught on hook then they will continue to grow and reproduce. They are big enough that it would have to take a very large LMB to target them.
Knobber, the YP are pretty good at staying out of your view. I only saw mine because they were pellet trained. And even then you rarely got to recognize them, but only you recognized their swimming pattern or their surface attack pattern. They would rocket up from the bottom and make a quick flip-turn at the top and rocket down so without a high speed camera you couldn't be sure it was a YP.
I did see as the YP got larger and more accustomed to coming to getting the pellets in the same place they would kind of coast up to the surface and take it down and do their little flip turn and head back down where you could actually make them out. I also found that they liked to hang out under my large turtle float. I think it gave them shade all day and a natural cover in about 6' of water. If I threw the pellets on top or and on the sides of the turtle float they would come up under it and feel more comfortable showing themselves. So consider putting a floating raft/dock or even a floating square out there and feed around it and the YP may predictably come up.
I made my turtle floats out of a scrap piece of garage door that was laying around. The door is clad in aluminum which doesn't rot/rust and it has thin layer of foam insulation in between to help it float. I had some old rescued commercial carpet squares that I screwed on top to give the turtles something to grip their claws into when climbing up. I also left the carpet square on the edges sticking over about 6" which lets them droop in the water and the turtles will often just float on the edge of the carpet square in the water before climbing on board.
