OK this is it, I am going to drain my pond and start over so I have some questions. First I want to tell you about the
pond. The pond is .5 acres with depths of 12 feet and an average depth of about 9 feet(if I did it right). It is fed by a
small stream and has springs in the pond. When the pond fills the extra water backs up into the creek and makes a
stream around the pond to a swamp and then into another creek. This pond is about 20 years old and has had some
sort of fish in it most of it's life.
About the fish, almost 10 years ago I stocked bass and bluegill in it and was removing any pike that I
caught, with excellent results. The bass were all 14”-22” long ,22 of them, and the bluegill were all nice size but
not sure how many were put on because more than one person was helping me. Recently I put in about 20 keeper
crappie, witch I later found out was bad.
About the catch, when all of this stocking was first done the fishing was great, bass bit good and you could
catch them pretty easily and the gills could be caught but not as good as it is now. All bass were released and small
numbers of gills were kept except I have a pretty good idea that people were trespassing and taking fish out. Now
the bass fishing has been getting worse every year, I can catch them but very few and the ones that I catch are 2-3
pounds, maybe 1 per time out. I can see more bass and lots of minnow bass but I don't catch or see small 8-12
inchers or so. The gills that I catch now are 50% 6”+ and 50% 6”- with some of them reaching 10+ inches. One
note about the gills, in the winter ice fishing I can't catch very many keeper gills but lots of 3-5 inchers. Since the
crappie were put in they are caught once in a while, also a pike is caught once in a while but very rarely.
About the plan of attack, I want to drain the pond empty and try to net any fish that I can get and put them
in another pond or something other than killing them because I am afraid that there might be some nice ones in the
pond. If I can't do this then I will drain it down as far as I can and poison the fish to get a total kill. While the
pond is down I also am going to build a concrete dam so I can control the water depth and to have better flood
control and so I can have water moving thru the pond to keep the top of the water clean . I am then going to stock
the pond with adult bass and bluegill and some type of minnows for the bass if necessary.
After the plan of attack, I hope I will keep up on the managing and testing the water and keeping records
of all fish caught and anything else that I will need to do. I have started to read about this subject and am getting
very excited to get started.
In addition to all of this I want this pond to be mainly trophy bass with bluegills as a secondary priority,
probably just like most everybody else.
The questions.
1. How many adult bass and gills can I put in this .5 acre pond?
2. Can the gills be just hybrids or none or a combination?
3. Will I need to feed the bass? The gills?
4. How many fish should I take out per year if I start out with adult fish?
5. When should I put them in?
6. What do you think of my plan? Should I drain and start from scratch?
Well this is about all I can think of right now. I have read some information on this but not on stocking
adult fish and I also just want to know what all of you thought. It seems that there are no all around answers when
people ask about what to do it seems as though all ponds are just a little different and need different methods to
produce the wanted results. Thank you very much for any of your ideas and answers to my post I hope to hear from
allot of you fellow pond bossers.