Pond Boss Forums Thread Like Summary - Coontail elimination in 4 acre feet farm pond

My pond is .5 acre with about 7 foot average depth. 4 acre feet or under. I am a 72 year old widow, some what active. Last year my pond was covered by coontail. I manually harvested it by pulling out by clumps into a canoe. Put oar into water, swirled it until gathered a large clump then pulled into canoe again and again. It looked much better. So now I am concerned about the growth again. I really don't want to do that again. I have been looking into fluridone. Expensive.

Questions:
1. What effect should the self harvesting have on the growth this year.
2. Should I wait to see what happens this year before treating.
3. Is Fluridone overkill?
4. Something better?
5. I have been looking at Sonar RTU. Any advise on this product or any recommendations would be sincerely appreciated. Sonar RTU sounds like the simplest but can't find many reviews on results.
My pond has no outlets. Basically self contained. 100 year old pond probably. Some fish but don't use it for much.
I like the long acting possibility of Fluidone but price could be an issue.
Also have looked at:
Diquat (Rated: Excellent)
Endothall (Rated: Excellent)
Fluridone (Rated: Excellent)
The quick acting Diquat and Endothall a lot of work. Multiple appilcations. Which is harder for me. I have a 15 gal sprayer and the spray doesn't reach to the middle of my pond which is about 100 feet wide.
I have been researching this for hours and hours over the years and hoping for some easy resolutions.
Thank you before hand.
Any help, suggestions appreciated.

esshup has it correct. For the coontail you should only add enough chemical to treat the water above the sediment layer. Once you get it killed ask OSU extension about putting in enough grass carp to keep it fairly clean. Don't put in enough grass carp to eat it all or the coontail biomass will be replaced by filamentous algae. You always need something in the pond to be consuming all the recycling nutrients. Nature demands that something will feed and grow with all those accumulated nutrients contained and trapped in the 36 yr old pond basin. Pond is very enriched as is evidenced by the amount of coontail that currently grows each year in the pond.

What ever muck and sludge they removed had to be beneficial to some degree for getting accumulated organic nutrients. How much benefit depends of the total amount of accumulated sludge in the pond. The amount of new plant growth will depend on the amount of remaining nutrient basis still in the pond.

Remember killing submerged or floating plants does nothing to reduce the amount of total nutrients in the pond. It basically just blows ones nose when having a head cold; very temporary relief. The Virus infection has to be eliminated before the runny nose and congestion problems are eliminated. Nutrient level has to be measurably reduced before amount of plant growth is significantly reduced. A 100 year old pond at this point in its life is a good candidate for a complete rebuilding of the pond.

I am still NOT convinced the weed problem is coontail and that the 100yr old pond has an average depth of 7ft and 4 acft of water. Maybe yes this was true as a new pond, but now not after 100 years. Normal ponds without bottom aeration accumulate one inch of bottom muck and slop each year. 100 " = 6ft to 8ft shallower. Before I would be spending good money on herbicides, I would make darn sure of the plant identification AND maximum and average pond depths.
Okay I just called and talked to the project manager of Mucksuckers. He said the pond as he remembered it was only about 0.25 ac, somewhat horseshoe shaped and around 7 ft max depth. By all means this should be fully verified before any chemical calculations and volumes are added to kill the weeds; PLUS verify the weeds are really coontail. If one does not know the structural details of submerged vegetation Coontail (Ceratophyllum) can be easily confused with Chara, the milfoils (Myriophyllum), bladerworts (Utricularia), the naiads (Najas) and even common waterweed Elodea.

If I had an address of the pond I could look the pond up on one of the satellite measuring tools and measure it to verify the pond size. You can send me or esshup a Private Message.

The only time I have seen aquatic herbicides and/or algaecides affect fish (make them leave an area for any length of time) was when the company that had the contract to kill weeds at the local public lake sprayed for weeds and algae when the BG were bedding. They left the beds and didn't come back until the following month. I don't know if they killed the eggs or what happened. They said they sprayed a mixture of Weedtrine D and Copper Sulfate.

Topwater fishing in late summer is a blast.

^^^ All great points!

My coontail doesn't grow deeper than 8ft, so a lot of the basin remains open. And it seems crawdads love to eat the stuff. I like to topwater fish over the coontail in the summer. Almost every bass I catch is full of crawdads. That has to be a great food source for them.