It's been mighty quiet from your corner of the Plains.

Your PB family wants to let you know that we hope all's well on the Conderosa, that your flood waters are receding, your feeders are dried out, and no walking catfish have used this deluge as an opportunity to contaminate Panfish Nirvana.

Home of Lepomis Cobainus!

What no female Lepomis Love ?

Just got back from fishing all day. Dead tired!

Ponds have drained back to full pool. Water clarity readings were 22-24 inches before the rain, went down to zero, now are back up to 11-13 inches.

Amazingly the Sweeney feeders are still functioning. I'll have to touch on this later, but the new one with the auger system acts like nothing happened! I'm thoroughly impressed. Fish are already back on the feed.

My worst problem was a total washout of my beach. It will be expensive to get gravel delivered again and spread out.

I only noticed a total of five fish dead. Two yellow perch, one redear and two bluegill. The redear was gigantic, like eleven inches.

Amazing experience.

More later.

Bruce,

Were all the dead fish in the big pond? What do you think caused the mortalities?

I had one dead fish in the big pond. It was a ten inch bluegill.

I had four dead fish in my Dad's pond.

My guess is this: On Sat. night my water volume doubled in the ponds for about an hour, and I think the sudden influx of zero salinity, and different temperature just shocked some of the fish.

Bruce, did the water end up going over the corner of your dam?

It got close, but never made it. Whew!!

I'll bet that was a relief.

I will be out salvaging BG tonight with Blaser's blessing, you are more than welcome to show up if you want. My guess is that there is still some clean up left to do at your place.

How much of a difference was the temperature and are you sure since you don't mix your water column you didn't get an anoxic bottom layer mixing rapidly with your surface water due to the temperature drop?

The difference was only about six degrees, but it happened so fast it may have stressed some of them.

Rapid mixing?..Possibly, hadn't thought about it because I don't think about having much difference in the water column yet this time of year. You could very possibly be right.

Well it's just a hunch and true this seems awfully early for a turnover to occur. What kind of bottom sediments do you have? Is it a really black mucky layer? How old is your dad's pond?

My big pond after running the two diffusers is the same temp from top to bottom (12 feet) from spring until I shut them off.

My big pond got renovated and de-silted in 2001.

My Dad's pond was fully excavated to the original clay in fall of 2005, so it's not too bad.

Anything unusual about your top soil that when leeched could cause problems? Ever have it tested? I know you called one of your ponds "The toxic pond."

I think five dead fish out of 1100 during a flood event is probably small enough that it's not a toxicity problem.

I think the "toxic" pond is just so nutrient loaded that it's more or less a fish toilet. I also refuse to commit a lot of resources to that pond to keep it healthy, i.e. circulators, extra water, etc. It's going to get a visit from Mr. Bulldozer this summer.