Pond Boss Forums Active Threads This Week

Dono - If you happen to pay us a visit near this year's birthday -- Here Is Wishing For You A Great Ontario Style Birthday. Don't be a such a stranger and return with updates about your successful perch pond experiences. Send me a PM about the success of your reproduction status of your emerald and common shiners.

Very good HSB report - keep up the excellence.

My dad has an older .22 Hornet, maybe from the 80s. Thing a tack driver and groundhog slayer. His is stock and he uses Hornady V-Max rounds.

Thanks for the heads up.

From all I read it seemed as if it was a world wide device.
I will see if it works as described.

Thank you for your time & ideas. I agree & have started to institute most all of them. I have been keeping a log since May of this year with 23 LMB removed & 6 Bullhead catfish. All have been measured & weighed. Right at the moment I can't give you the total weight, I am thinking about numbers not pounds. My goal was to remove 30 LMB. The Bass now seem to be hook shy. I catch one now & then. I will try more fishing from my canoe when I have time.

Bream smaller than 6" & LMB smaller than 10" are almost non existent in the pond. While I have not determined the relative weights of the bream. The ones I have caught appear on the skinny side. My reason for feeding the bream is to have them in their best breeding condition for next spring's spawn. I am thinking a better spawn & more fry. Allowing weeds to develop near shore to become areas for small fish to hide. The pond has almost weed free for the last 25 years. An idea came to mind after seeing some plastic expensive spawning beds on the internet. The pond has only one good spawning area that I have been able to find. I made 12 "Craig's Canoodling Beds for Bream" for less than $15. each. We will see if there is a second spawning bed next spring. If successful, I will share their construction.

Had not thought about the Stubby Steve's. There is only one TGC 3+' & about 10 years old he should not have to many years left. I could tolerate the tilapia if I knew I had some females. Pond gets cold enough to slow them down & make them easy prey but not kill them all.

Goals for '24: Take out as many predator fish as I can. Continue to keep accurate log. Feed forage fish to get good spawns. For the life of me I have no idea if I have any female Tilapias in the pond. If I see a better population of bream & the relative weights of the LMB shift, I will consider adding tilapia again.

My question about the amount of feed/acre was to help me confirm I was on the right tract. I got to many skinny LMB & much to few skinny forage fish.

I don't have a Hornet or a K-Hornet, but Lil Gun has a good reputation in them.

J.E.C. your pond problem commonly occurs. esshup has some good fish management information. LMB under weight and an underpopulation of forage fish strongly suggest that there are too many predators eating too many smaller fish. I don't think the basic answer is adding more food or forage fish to the problem. The best solution of too many predators is reducing the number of predators until the small fish numbers gradually increases their ability to reproduce, and the young ones live long enough to reproduce. In some situations it can help to temporarily add some breeder forage fish until fewer bass are present and more young fish are present (survive). Depending on the habitat some cover habitat may need to be added to temporarily or permanently help more young forage fish survive to larger more fruitful and beneficial sizes.

If you had 10 or 12 lions or wolves in a pen or confined area and they were skinny or overly lean but still reproducing more youngsters per year, would your solution be to always keep adding more food for them to now keep more of them all fat and healthy? After a year or two their numbers could more than double and then quadruple after a few more years. Now you have 24 to 50 lions/wolves. I don't think that plan would be the best, wisest management unless you are in the commercial farming business of growing lions/wolves. . Best management would be to reduce the number of them to the best, healthiest reproducing individuals so their numbers would usually stay around 6 to maybe 10 in the pen. Selective breeding and population management for the size of the pen.

BTW, that big pond, due to drought, would have trouble making a 3/4 acre. The feeder is a long way from the water. When I go there, I hand toss some. Not much comes.

I only have a few and each have different fin clips.

Sweet report!!!

I may have missed it, but was the fish tagged?

Good job Snipe! (Growing AND catching.)

Being caught 3 times in just over three years is a testament to that fish NOT becoming hook shy.

Is that more typical of a large HSB compared to a large LMB? If so, seems like adding a few HSB as a "bonus fish" in ponds for recreational fishing would be a pretty good idea.



P.S. If Snipe is out catching wipers, do we now need to call him a sniper?

If you are making that pond larger, if you don't drain the water first plan on spending 3x more in operating cost to move the dirt than if you were to be digging in dry dirt without the water. The water washes the dirt back out of the bucket, and you cannot contour the bottom of the pond with the water in there.

J.E. Craig, unless you have feed trained LMB, feeding the fish in the pond won't help (much) in putting more weight on those LMB. You HAVE TO remove a bunch of them to ensure that there is enough forage fish of the correct size in the pond to feed those LMB.

Just like having too many cows in a pasture, fertilizing the pasture won't grow enough grass to feed them all. Supplemental feeding the cows will work, but ONLY if they are eating the feed.

Go buy a couple packages of Stubby Steves artificial fish food pellets and use them to fish with. Catch and release the TGC, they will swear off of the food for a while once caught. Catch the large male Tilapia and eat a few, ditto with the turtles, or just remove the excess from the pond.

A word of advice for the Deeper Pro 2.

The Deeper Pro 2+ is only available in the european or asian market. It isn't available in the states (according to Deeper) So, the Deeper Pro 2 does NOT have the mapping capability, although it does have chirp technology.

I just received a Deeper Pro2+ from Japan, I have to go play with it to make sure that it will work with the USA GPS satellites.

For fish-friendly pond designs, you might want to check out resources from the FWC. They have guidelines and recommendations tailored to the region's climate and ecosystems, ensuring your pond can support a variety of fish species. Keep flexibility in mind for later stocking.

I was interested in the amount being fed in ponds with a more normal or ideal populations. Mine has a LMB overpopulation for 20 years with an under population of forage fish. All LMB caught have a RW of 75% or less. The 2# that I throw at night disappears in 5 minutes, but the large male tilapia, grass carp, & turtles get their share. I suspected that I have a bream population that is smaller than ideal. What I see when I feed confirms this. Grass Carp just Hoover it in.

Esshup,

Thanks for the tips on the Deeper Pro + . I did take a look at all that was available & the specs. Deeper does seem like the best bet for the dollar. some are not much more than toys. I was attracted by the Garmin name. Deeper Pro + 2 is more advanced, found it on sale & for just $50. more it seemed like a good buy.

Exactly. Most of the RW ~ or > than 130 (where dates of catch were available) were caught in the Spring. One notable exception was the Ottawa fish which had a date of August. Not sure if that was the date the record was awarded or the date caught. Or possibly something else can explain, (eg lead weight, cold summer, rebuilt egg mass over summer, etc)

Beautiful fish. Congratulations!

Largest LMB I ever caught was 27" post spawn momma that we estimated at 11 to 12 lbs. So if we'd managed to catch her in peak gravid condition, you would estimate 13 plus lbs?

Converting formulas say 24-1/32" and 7lbs, 14.7 oz., so well into the 110's RW.

Chunky fish, great growth! What's it's length/weight?

I picked up a CZ American 527 in .22 Hornet and scope a few years ago and just got around to playing with it now. I rented a chamber reamer to change it into a K-hornet, now I'm fire forming the brass after I annealed it. The bigger issue is that with the plastic spacer in the magazine, I can't seat the bullets out far enough to get them close to the lands/grooves. So, I'm seeing if a buddy can 3D print me a smaller spacer - I gave him a drawing of what I need.

I'm not looking at setting any speed records with it, I just wanted something that had a bit more reach than the 17 HMR but didn't want to drag out the .223.

Does anybody have any pet loads for it? I have 'lil gun, CFE Blk, Vihtavuori N-110, H-110, H-4198 and an OLD metal can of 4227 Unfortunately I don't have any Rem 7 1/2 primers. just Win small pistol primers and some small rifle primers.

As for bullets, I have 36g Barnes Varmint Grenades, 40g Sierra 1200, 1385, Speer 1017 and Hornady V-Max.

This wiper is from a seine effort in November of 2020. FishinRod assisted in the effort.
These were early 2020 hatch that snrub grew in his forage pond and we seined quite a few out to spread around. this particular fish was about 7.5" stocked into my pond about December 1st, 2020.


First recatch was May 2021 by a youngster with a smile...



In October of 2022 I managed to hook it again...



Tonight, (Dec 7, 2023) I got lucky again...at 4.5yrs of age.

Good buck Theo! Have you found any difference in accuracy if you swapped primers?