Pond Boss Forums Thread Like Summary - Pond Pics In Review

I bought this property 11 years ago and over that time we have caught some whoopers from the little 5 acre pond.

Every year it surprises me how many crappie we catch.

Another good morning fishing yesterday. The 9-pounder was a blast to reel in.

Reminds me of a story when a friend ran into a guy hunting on his best friend's new property up near Muenster, Texas. The trespassing guy stated "I been hunting on this land for many years, these city folk come out and buy the land and think they own it".

Amazing pictures Tbar!

If these pictures show us anything is that Tbar has an amazing balance in his pond, some beautiful LMB and an abundance of really nice eating size crappie, all the way up to a trophy sized crappie in a 2 plus pounder.

What these pictures also shows us that he is not scared to harvest a lot of crappie, they are relatively easy to catch, can be caught by the hundreds during the spawning season.

What they also show us that this feller eats better then most folks, enjoying those crappie, making my mouth water looking at the crappie pics.

What I have not figured out is why so many people are so affeared of having a lot of crappie to eat, I cant imagine sitting on the bank and crying about the crappie taking over your body of water. grab a pole and some bait, almost any bait, and catch the over run of crappie, get their numbers in balance, and have some of the best eating out of your pond, and a ton of fun catching them.

An easy indicator for the success of crappie in your pond is their size, if they are smaller then you'd like, you're not eating enough of them.

Sorry, 100#'s is incorrect. I fed ten 50# bags this year to the TP and CNBG.
The pond was dug by the PO. I do not know its age other than knowing its =<40 years old. He let lots of people fish it. When I closed it down I heard a lot of complaining from people in town.

Believe it or not some of those are taken in the dead of winter.

Yesterday was a good day at the pond. My son and two friends came over to fish and helped me take ~30 cull LMB out of the pond.

They also took home 29 BC one of which was 2.11 pounds.

Nice T
Like the crappie best, wish I could get them like that in my 6acre puddle

This is gospel truth from my experience with crappie(we call them white perch down here lol).

My brother lives on a sub division lake that has roughly 20 houses on it. Year one of him living there, we caught tons of crappie but they were all 6-8 inches long. I'm not sure how many other families were keeping them, but we did our part and kept about 100 fish that year. Incredible eating.

Year two, same experience...no change in lengths but once again we did our part keeping around 100 fish again. By year three we finally could see the improvement with lots of fish over 12 inches in length. We continue to keep about 100 fish a year from that body of water and the fish look so much healthier.

Honestly, I'm pretty sure we could have kept triple the fish per year and been just fine.....

That fine fish appears to be a White Crappie. Noticed what appeared to be a few WCP sprinkled in the pics but this photo is detailed enough to make a better visual determination.

Pretty freshly dead, if it was dead before the Eagle got it out of the pond. Dead fish don't bleed..... and it looks like it's not the first fish that was eaten at that spot! Eyes are bugged out and the tail looks like it is healing up from spawning.

Just think of it as one (and about 2.5#) less you have to worry about taking out this year.

Pat, I think if you had WCP that you would see more recruitment of Crappie. Every pond is different and so different ponds will evolve differently. It's not clear how your particular pond will evolve.

Some authors (starting with Swingle) thought/think that Crappie can cause LMB recruitment to fail. If this were to happen, the most dreaded case (some say this is inevitable) where a pond becomes forage locked with stunted crappie can occur. Tbar's pond is an example of good balance between the LMB and crappie (and BG). And his pond is >= 40 years of age so good balance in a crappie BOW of <20 acres is possible. I think the key is regular (but not excessive) recruitment of LMB. There should be some representation of LMB that are large enough to consume 4-7" crappie (consume them easily enough to effectively control the number crappie surviving the second year). The balance would be good when enough survive to 8" each year to supply your annual exploitation and the needed recruitment of brood crappie.

If you were going to try adding WCP, there are a couple of approaches you could try. Stocking brood fish or stocking large numbers of consumable WCP. To be affordable, the latter would have to be home grown, eg a drainable forage pond. If you were successful in establishing a population that can recruit in situ in sufficient numbers you could transition that forage pond to the production of minnows (eg a box of GSH growing them to nursed fry stage and then for the remainder production of FHM). I think it would take some time to get a good population of crappie established. I think, presently, the BG are numerous enough that the space for crappie is limited. This may be why you are having such limited recruitment of BCP ... but I am in no way certain of that.