Two and a half years ago we acquired an 18 acre tract with small, three bedroom house, outbuilding and my bride's Grandmother's old pond, about an acre, more or less. It was the last piece of the original tract owned by her maternal grandparents to be acquired by the bride and her brother.
Here's the pond as it looked when the property was acquired. View from porch of house. I retired a few months after the purchase and spent several months sampling the fishery and developing plans, one to manage as is and one to renovate and begin over. Upon a thorough investigation of the fishes, we determined it was full of stunted black crappie, green sunfish and green sunfish/bluegill hybrids. Green sunfish were the apex predator as we did not confirm the existence of one largemouth bass. We agreed to take it down to grown zero retaining as much of the original dam's integrity as possible.
View showing portion of dam with willows, large pines, briars and mats of alligator weeds. The dam had deteriorated such that it was simply a narrow dike holding the water back.
First step, pumping pond as low as we could. We scrounged up a pump within the family and a family member willing to spend the time[with compensation] pumping it down. We still had a ways to go in this photo but you can see what we were dealing left. We were able to get it down to a two foot average depth along the dam. Once this was completed Rotenone was to kill the remaining fish. Our initial assessment was correct, no bass and a bunch of runts. I never found a fish or minnow that survived the Rotenone. If you have used Rotenone or attempted to acquire it lately, you will find it a laborious process dealing with licensed chemical applicators, etc., to acquire and have it applied.
I hired a long time acquaintance who builds ponds and renovates earth dams as part of his business. I stayed on the property with the contractor the entire three days to insure we lost no time when we had to solve a problem or change direction based upon some issue. The two earth, casting piers he is building accomplished a couple things. It added pond edge with deep water, provided easy access to deeper water and clear back cast room for the fly rod, my favorite weapon.
The pier downhill from the house is a great place to feed pellets over deep water. It saved me the problem of what to do with all the dirt and silt the contractor was generating and access to more water, which correlated to more deep water. With a goal of growing big copper nose bluegill, I wanted a high ratio of deep water to shallow and clean banks to make it easier for the bass to locate and eliminate small blue gill.
Here's the finished product.
Dam covered with straw mats used to control erosion and seeded with winter wheat. I used them to cover the earth "casting piers" as well to control erosion.
The pond finished at a little over an acre. We stocked 800 copper nose bluegill, 200 red ear sunfish, 50 largemouth bass and 10 pounds of fat head minnows in late February, 2016. I put them on Aquamax 500 as soon as they would come to pellets and have monitored their growth monthly. We plan to begin removing some of the original stocking this summer and bass over 14". These are what our largest copper nose look like. The gill pushing 9" is noticeably the larger of the two but the photo doesn't do it justice.
