My questions is if I drain the pond down roughly 1 or 2' would this cause any problems. My plan is to lower the water level so that it would allow me to work on the controlling the erosion that is starting to occur on the spillway. My concern is harming the fish.

Pond is 2.5 acres and probably gets to close to 3 acres when overfilled after a big rain. Fish include 400 YP, 200 BG, 150 RES, 15 GP.

Max depth at full pool is 12' and average depth is probably 5-6'

dropping your pond down a few feet should cause no problems at all

I dropped mine 18" last spring - no issues at all

With 12ft of depth you could lower the pond 4 to 6ft and still not have a major impact on the fishery except normal spawning areas could be high and dry unless you refill it prespawn.

Question for you re: your stocking. I'm not real familiar with GP (I assume grass pickerel). Are they up for the challenge of keeping YP and BG under control? Or will you be adding additional predators?

Dam'd - My apologies, GP was a typo. I meant 15 Grass Carp.

I will start lowering the pond tomorrow then. Probably do it in small steps just to be safe. We have been getting a lot of rain here in NE OH so the water comes in quite fast through a 12" inlet. It will likely take all weekend or longer to drain down.

So did you describe an initial stocking with plans to add predator fish later after the forage is established? LMB? HSB? You're going to want to add something to that mix.

Drawdowns are a good management tool when used correctly. In your case it should be ok as a non-management tool as there are not large scale predators in the pond which could decimate forage fish in a drawdown. If you do not have much cover at drawdown depths and will hold the water down through the spawning season then you may need to add some thick cover for newly spawned fish to hide in.

Curious about the erosion problem on your spillway - is this your primary spillway (no pipe), or just the emergency spillway that needs some help?

Dam'd - In addition to my Grass Carp typo I also forgot to mention that there are 50 HSB and a large amount of FHM. The HSB were added about a year after all of the other fish and were only about 4"

Red- The pond has a 6" agri-drain pipe that allows the water level to be adjusted easily and takes the water to a nearby creek. I have been leaving the water level very near the full capacity, but during these heavy rain periods there is so much water coming into the pond that the little 6" drain pipe can't keep up. The spillway is a must with the amount of water that comes into this pond. The pond is low lying and gets fed from another creek coming off a nearby farm field.


On one hand, it is a nice problem to have the abundance of water coming in, but on the other hand it can really pour over the spillway during the rainy season and make the pond resemble a giant puddle.


As time and money allows my plan down the road would be to divert the feeder creek to the creek that everything drains to and install a valve that would allow me to flow water into the pond as needed, or completely bypass the pond inlet.