After the hot week last week and cloudy weekend, followed by cold rain, I have now found two dead CC; a 17" and a 19-1/2". It looks like the F.A. around the shallows has turned dark, and some of it sank. I am thinking that contributed to the low D.O. (or other toxic event). My other thread under water chemistry describes the event and action taken.

My question now is should I try to rake all the FA out of the pond at the risk of muddying the shallows? I think I can get 70% of the FA out with a leaf rake by wading the shallows.

IMHO removing the FA mats is a good thing as IME they block sunlight and create anoxic conditions in the shallows..

I wonder if maybe you have "hit the wall" on capacity for an un-aerated pond. IMO I would harvest a bunch of CC. If you had to guess, how many pounds/acre are you at in the problem pond?

Just my 1 cent...

Don't know how many CC have survived since stocking. I stocked 78, found two dead the first winter, have taken seven out since last fall from 2.5 to 3.8 pounds. I would bet there is close to 180 to 200 lbs CC in my 1/4 acre pond still. Can't harvest now. They are not much interested in food, so won't bite a hook. I have been monitoring closely, and will attempt to net out any CC that seem to be in distress. At least I can eat the ones I can net out before they die. Hopefully, with the pause in feeding, things will return close enough to normal that I can catch a bunch of them out.

I just finished removing at about 250 pounds of FA without muddying too much. I found a good method. I had about a 20 foot dried sapling pole with a bunch of nubs near the end. Insert into a mat of FA and rotate the stick several times, then drag out and clean off. Found several big crawdads wrapped in there as I was cleaning it off. Maybe they are eating FA?

Edit: Thurs June 22 - no more dead fish found. Threw out small amount of food this morning; CC ate it right away. Going to try to fish out as many as I can late this afternoon.