Pond Boss Forums Thread Like Summary - Frustrated.

This is gonna be long so bare with me. We bought a house in southeast missouri with a 1 acre pond attached in April of last year. The owner stated it had some large channel catfish, bass, bluegill. My sons and I fished it at the end of April through may and did not catch a single bluegill or channel catfish. Tried every method imaginable. We also fished for bass regularly and with 5-6 people fishing a 1 acre pond we would catch 1-3 total over an hour or two. So I decided there wasn’t much in the pond and stocked 400 BG, 400 red ear sunfish, 150 channel catfish and 10 lbs of minnows in June. . We continued bass fishing through summer and same story, extremely slow. So this year I was looking forward to catching a few bluegill and channel catfish. So far we have not caught either one at all. Again trying numerous methods. My first thought was there are way more lmb than we thought.l and my fish got eaten. But there are minnow everywhere. We had not added any other than the 10lbs last June. They seemed to have successfully spawned and the pond is loaded with minnows. And again, bass fishing is just so slow it doesn’t seem possible there’s very many bass in it. It is spring fed, so I’m not sure if water temps are still too low. I really don’t want to have to have the pond shocked, just looking for possible ideas as to what is going on. Thanks

Another feeding story. This was so much fun, I don't know why I don't do it every year.

I was setting out minnow traps to see what the fingerling hatch looked like in one of my small ponds. I was getting a bunch of hybrids (HBG or HRES) in the traps. Didn't want that much propagation so decided to remove the fish. Checked traps (several)once or twice a day and removed the fish I did not like the looks of. Decided the 2-3" lepomis would make good fish food.

So I would just dump them into an empty bucket (with no water) and walk them over to my main pond. I did not want them living and stocking that pond so not only did they not get any water to live in for 5-15 minutes, I took a pair of scisors and cut off the tails. All the way up into the meat to make sure if nothing ate them right away they would die and the turtles could have them.

Then I sat on the dock and tossed them in one by one as I cut the tails off. If it was a bigger one I might also clip off the dorsal fins.

Within two or three days the locals had learned the routine and the sound of my footsteps on the dock boards would bring some LMB and eventually the CC would show up. I would throw the half dead slugish tail-less fingerlings into the water one at a time and the LMB would just hammer them as soon as the fish got deep enough I could barely see the "flash" of the bass nailing it. After the bass made some noise then the CC would show up and the race was on who could get to the fish first. I would have anywhere from ten up to maybe 50 of these small fish that I would feed pretty much daily for probably a month in the summer a couple years ago. I looked forward to seeing the action and what became almost pet LMB and I'm pretty sure they enjoyed it too, if bass enjoy anything.

I should do that again. It was a lot of fun. It amazed me how quickly the predators caught on and knew the routine.