Congrats on the pond do-over!

Lots of threads on trophy bass in the archives.

If you wanted true "trophies" (and money was no object) then you might be closest to that goal by stocking only female Florida strain. You could calculate the total mass of fish in the pond that would be needed to support your target LMB (10#+?) and stock only that many females plus a margin for early mortality in the life cycle (25% extra?).

They also tend to be less aggressive than northern LMB for catchability, and will quickly become hook shy, so you need to NOT fish for bass until they are reaching your trophy target size. Personally, I doubt I could handle that tolerance for extreme patience, but if you have other good ponds, then you might be able to pull it off.

Sounds like you are going to have great fun on this endeavor before you even start on the "catching trophy bass" part!

P.S. If you are going to do more stockings after your initial bass stocking, you might want to consider tagging or fin-clipping your fish so you can monitor the genetics and fish growth of each class of bass. Some other guys have noted that regret over the life cycle of their trophy bass pond as they did subsequent corrective stockings.

P.P.S. Are you going to be able to do electroshock surveys? If you are not fishing the pond on a regular basis, you will probably need some surveys every few years to make sure your forage populations are healthy and in balance, as well as check on your LMB.

Good luck on this project. I look forward to reading about some stellar results in the future!

Hopefully, some of our actual experts will drop into your thread with some more specific advice.