I read this post and took it to heart. I live not too far from Liquidsquid and my 1.3 acre pond is under about 8" of mostly fluffy snow. I have two aerators running in shallow water but we have been consistently near or below 0 at night so the open areas have shrunk to about 20' across each. I have over 12" of ice right now so I took my small utility tractor and cleared maybe 1/3 acre about 200' from the open holes. Like Liquidsquid, we had a partial thaw and refreeze and you can see the pattern in the exposed ice. I should buy an O2 meter, but I'm too cheap. We'll just have to see if we avoid fish kill. One good sign is that last Saturday I caught a 12.3oz 11-1/4" YP full of eggs, so something is alive under there.
I'd really love to know if the limited holes from aeration were good enough, or should I plow every winter. Sounds like a good study.
One more comment: the white ring near the bottom of the picture is where I angered. I didn't see any water coming up through. To keep the ice level I keep one of the aerators at the spillway and the spillway seems to run all winter under the snow & ice and keeps the pond fairly constant until ice out.
