Pond Boss Forums Thread Like Summary - New from Maine

Thank you all for having me.
I am excited to have found this place!
As my screen name says I am the owner of land that contains 3 ponds. There's certainly more, but for sake of this site, 3 ponds I need to take care of.
My wife and I changed plans from building a house on the big lake our camp is on and retiring there, to buying a large property with private ponds and living the land life instead of the lake life in the goldens.
To that end we purchased a 312-acre property in Detroit, Maine. (yep, there is one pop. 885).
This property was assembled back in the 1970s by a successful Texas surgeon. He liked to fish, he liked to ski, he liked the coast of Maine, so he built his nature getaway. Detroit is an hour away from the coast, it's an hour away from big-as -you-get-in-Maine mountain skiing, and the fishing was right on this property both created and natural.
The natural fishing is 8000 feet frontage on the Sebasticook River, and Libby brook, a small creek that bisects the property for about 1 mile and empties into the Sebasticook.
The man made are 3 ponds that were built and used as a trout hatchery for about 30+ years. The holding pond, more of a decorative pond and the one they would do most of the fishing from is about 3/4 acre. The middle pond is about 11/3 acres, and the third is about 11/4 acres. They are each at a lower grade than the other. They are (were mostly) connected by spillways that could be adjusted for flow. The largest pond clearly looks like it was intended to be able to be made to have current, I would suppose for spawning. As I mentioned, it's not in operational format now. It's just 3 stand-alone ponds, with varying ability to control their levels.
It came to be in disrepair as the surgeon and his wife would come here. They built a 1 bedroom log cabin from trees onsite, and this was their happy place. She got sick, the trips stopped, he couldn't bear to come alone, so for nearly 15 years, a caretaker lived there and took no care of the property and the ponds. Move forward and they're both gone and the son gets the property and spends a year putting it back as much as possible in a year. It goes onto the market and here we are.
I have about 10000 questions for the folks here and I can't wait to spend more time searching for answers.
The ponds are really nice, crystal clear and filled with fish.
That's one of the things I am so looking forward to for help here. The owner says the trout are gone and there's just chub and sunfish now. Less than 1 hour of fishing and observation thus far reveals as many sunfish as you want lol and visibly at least a few chubb. Should be able to fish a little more and do some depth soundings this week. Been told pond one 20 feet, pond 2 8 feet and pond 3 10. We'll see.
Thanks in advance for a lot of questions answered!

Raising trout, rather than raising trout AFTER spawning them, is a much easier task!

Can you go online and find a couple of fish suppliers in your area that supply trout? Find out their species, sizes, and time of year that they prefer to deliver in your area. (Also find out the prices for your own personal budget.)

Decide which species you want (you might be able to do multiple species in your conditions), and the size, and the approximate stocking date. I would then start a new post with that info plus the size, depth, and temps of your existing ponds. You will also need to have a grasp on the existing organisms in the ponds.

I expect the actual experts will tell you to "start over" on the pond organisms. They will probably also recommend a pellet feeder to supplement the recommended aquatic forage.

Finally, they may also recommend an aeration system. (Did you estimate a distance to AC electricity at your property?)

You can be a (mostly) absentee owner and still have your ponds and fish well cared for if you do your set-up correctly.

Well here's an update. Just spent some time walking around the largest pond, the middle pond I call pond 2. Got a nice view spot late in the afternoon where the sun lit the water column and I could sit quietly. It's filled with fish. I can see sunfish, lots of them. I'd say GSF and RSF. Pretty sure I see a couple chubb...and BROOK TROUT! No, I didn't catch any, I'm just looking at them, but the water is clear as a bell and I've caught about 8 gazillion brookies in my life, it's brook trout, I'm 97.375345% sure of it lol.

Congrats on the new property. It sounds fabulous!

What are your goals for the ponds?

It does sound like you are set up for trout, but if that is not your preference then you could set up the ponds for many other combinations of fish.

How were the ponds capable of sustaining a current? Were they spring-fed, or was water diverted from the creek at some higher elevation?

Good luck on the future development of your ponds and your property. That should be a very enjoyable adventure.

If you can figure out how to post pictures take a couple pictures of the sunfishes and chubs. Being in Maine there should be a trout farm within driving distance to buy some stocker trout. Keep track of the water temperatures of during July-Aug. Surface temperature and a near bottom temperature of the deeper pond. Do you have a small boat to determine pond depth?. If with a boat we can figure out a farily easy and cheap way to measure bottom water temperature. For best success for trout they should have water temps less than 70F.

Welcome to the forum! Posting pictures is easy if you upload your pictures to Imgur.

Water depth can be figured out from shore with a slip bobber and a heavy enough weight to sink the slip bobber if the line is shorter than the water depth where you are casting. Keep casting to the same spot and adjusting the depth of the sinker until the bobber just barely floats. Repeat until you found the deepest part, then measure the distance from sinker to bobber.

All 3 ponds do stay full from springs alone. The creek that empties into the upper pond is really only a creek on my property. Looking at satellite and from ground view just standing there, across the street from me is a large marshy, boggy area, as it comes to the road, it's collected into a large culvert and out the other side is my "creek". I should have labelled it a "canal". It's lined with flat pieces of blue slate and used to be stopped by a dam with an adjustable spillway. Not operational anymore. Water flow from there into the pond is dependent on general water levels in the area. Last fall zero water was flowing and hadn't been for obviously some time. As you would expect in melt season and later spring, water was just rushing down it. But even though rainfall has been fairly steady this year, it's already down to a trickle. I don't have any plans to try and spawn trout. I would like to have 3 ponds that support trout. If I can stock them and somehow, they figure out how to reproduce in the conditions that naturally occur there, then win. If I have to restock as required, then so be it.
As pointed out, I need to figure out what's there and all the details first. I live in Steep Falls Maine, that's 110 miles from Detroit. We can only visit on occasion, so progress is slow lol.
I will post up pics of fish caught and depths after I float around on all 3 of them for a while.

If you want control of your future trout project, you may need to eliminate the "stream-fed" option from your pond water supply. Your "recipe" for trout ponds can easily be ruined by allowing invasive fish from the stream to enter your trout ponds. You want to be able to control the inputs as much as possible since pond management is difficult enough to optimize.

Will your ponds stay full with just the water from the springs?

Perhaps the creek connection is just to allow water movement in the middle trout run pond so you can effectuate spawning during the season. You can either buy trout fingerlings and skip the spawning step, filter the entering creek water (difficult to avoid plugging), or set up a recirculation pump to re-create the current.

Do you have AC electricity near the ponds from the cabin? That would make a recirculation pump an affordable option. More importantly, it would allow you to much more economically provide aeration to your trout (which is their most critical health need).

Finally, your best option may be to kill all of the existing fish in your ponds and start over. As an outdoorsman, that always sounded terrible to me when I first joined Pond Boss, but the experts all agree on that topic if you are serious about your management goals.

I would follow the good advice your received above to determine the actual depth profiles in your ponds and also start taking temperature measurements at various depths. If your trout budget is large, then you should also consider buying a dissolved oxygen meter - but they ain't cheap.

Good luck on your projects, and I hope you enjoy reading up on trout fishery topics!

Welcome to the show.

Indifferent. Lusk once said “Anytime a turtle catches a fish, the fish deserved it “

Agree with DD1.

Turtles are welcome at my place , one used to come up to be fed with pellets hand thrown. I don’t see any downside

Excellent news on the close proximity of AC electricity!

In my (non-expert) opinion, you have all of the requirements for an awesome trout fishery on your place.

Invest in some pond improvements and an aeration system. Then your investment in trout fingerlings should be quite safe even while you are absent from the property.

(Aeration pumps do fail, and pipelines do rupture. Do you know any "pond" neighbors well yet? Paying a trusted teenager to go check on your property once/week might also be a good investment on your property when you are going to be absent for extended periods.)

Welcome to the forum! I'm a Mainer as well and have learned a great deal from the folks here. I'd be happy to help you with whatever I can. New England fisheries offer some unique opportunities as well as unique challenges.

It sounds like your goals and the original goals of the property align with each other, which should be an enormous benefit for you. Rather than trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, you should be able to instead get a good survey of what you have and get to work on the inevitable maintenance that has been neglected until it fell under your ownership.

In Maine, you need a stocking permit to add fish to your pond. In fact, it's illegal to be in possession of live fish (except bait) without one, even if they are in your boat livewell as you are fishing. Once you have a stocking permit, you can get trout from a few different privately owned hatcheries in the state. They should offer rainbows, browns, and of course brookies. I love the idea of having landlocked salmon in my pond, but I believe that the only hatcheries raising them are owned by the state and they aren't selling fish to mere mortals like us. Maine is also the only state in which it is illegal to stock bluegills, even though they are in most lakes and pond throughout the state. Thankfully that shouldn't impact your goals.

For what it's worth, brook trout have the potential to spawn in a pond environment, so if you want to consider a potential self-sustaining population of fish, they are probably worth your time. There is an article in a former Pond Boss magazine about how to create a spawning bed for them. If you call the PB Magazine office, you can buy a copy of it from them. I have learned that trout fry do well in trout ponds, but will likely become snacks in ponds that have warm water species in them (such as bass, perch, etc.)

Data that will be key before getting started with renovation will be getting a positive ID on your current fish species. If you are unsure, the people here are wonderful at helping identify fish if you have clear photos of them and can upload them here. I would caution you from using social media groups, as the "experts" there likely know less than you do. Fishing should get you a good sample of the sunfish (species and sizes) but you'll need seines or minnow traps to get an understanding of the rest of your food chain. Trout are opportunists, but tend to prefer bugs to fish prey so seining the shallows (particularly in weedy cover) should get you an understanding of what your ponds have to offer for aquatic bugs.

Other data that will be helpful will be confirming depths, getting dissolved oxygen (DO) readings at various depths (you can order test kits or a meter for this and it should be greater than 5ppm for trout), temperatures at the surface and temperatures at the deepest point where you have 5ppm or greater DO, Secchi disk readings to assess water clarity, and a comprehensive water chemistry analysis. The one done by Texas A&M University is the best that I'm aware of and is reasonably priced.

Good luck with your project and keep us posted on here on how it's going. Feel free to send me a private message on here with your contact info as well if you'd like to keep in touch outside of the forum.

Congrats on the Brookies!

Funny how one good "population sample" of your pond can brighten your entire month.