Pond Boss Forums INTRO New Forum Member Introduction New to the Forum

Hello. I'm new to the pond world. My family has several dozen ponds ranging from 1 to 10 acres in surface area. Over the last years we have felt the wrath of the drought. For the past 2 or 3 years we have taken advantage of the this dry time and rebuild a few of these ponds rebuilt. They have been engineered and should withstand future drought.

Luckily the last few weeks have been extremely wet for us. Most of these ponds are now at or over capacity. It's now time to rebuild habitat and reintroduce fish. I've started cutting a few cedar trees, gathered wood pallets, and have purchased materials for PVC structures. I've also placed a decent fish order: 2k large mouth, 2k crappie, 10k blue gill, 2k channel cat, and 500#'s of minnows.

Thanks for reading, and I look forward to learning here. Here's a few pics just for fun.

This is one that went near dry and was revamped. The same one behind the house pictured above

This one is spring fed and while it got down very low it never went dry.

A couple others.

Welcome to PBF 58Okie,

Lots of ponds and lots of fish. How are you stocking them? By that I mean for example are you going to have a bass pond, a bluegill pond, etc or mix them all up?

Again welcome!

Bill D.

Thanks for the welcome. My plan is to simply mix them all about. I do plan to put a higher concentration of the the catfish off into one pond. The others will be divided fairly evenly.

580 welcome, lots of smart folks here to help answer your questions. Good looking place you have


Pat

Welcome Okie; looks like a fun time coming?

Some of the soil looks kinda reddish. Where are you?

Thanks for the warm welcome. Dave, It's very red here in Western Oklahoma. The ponds have the red hue from all of the run off. It's hard to believe but in March these ponds had not caught much rain since being redone and were still extremely low to almost dry.

My place is about 30 miles South of the Red River and I see a lot of that red dirt. I'm only about10 to 15 miles south of that clay.

I feel your pain on rain that just doesn't come. But, rains don't always come on schedule. Counting small water holes, I have 8 or 9 ponds. The largest got down to about 3 ft before the rains started. All but this and another one were dry along with the creek. Then, it started raining and doesn't stop. You'll catch the right set of storms at some point. What town are you closest to?

Cheyenne is closest. We've caught the storms this year. We went from too dry to weld out side, to too wet to work. So far we are at 18.7" of rain and we are suppose to be getting another storm system starting today and going through the end of the week.

Here's a little comparison.
Before the big rains:

After (forgive me for posting this again):

Isn't that in the Black Kettle area? I've been through there and you see a lot of horizon. I'm originally from Muleshoe Texas so understand a little about sand.

58Okie,
Welcome to Pond Boss...lots of good info and helpful folks here!

Yes it's near the Black Kettle. It's pretty flat with a lot of canyons.

So I spent the last couple hours building some habitats. They don't look great but they oughta do. Used pvc, mini blinds, wood, all kinds of stuff.

Those look good.

They will work OK. I'm assuming that you have concrete in the bottom. If so, the next time you make some, put a couple of pieces of rebar in the bottom to keep them from tipping over.

Thanks for the rebar idea. I did fill each pot with concrete. I got these and some wood pallets put out yesterday. The paddle boat was not the best means of transport but it got the job done.

That is a great looking piece of property. You are going to have a lot of fun managing and fishing it.

Before you more or less evenly divide the fish as I think you post suggested you might want to do a little research about placing crappie in ponds of less than 10 or so acres, especially when trying to have crappie and bass in the same pond. Bob Lusk, (the Pond Boss) was just at my place and we have a nice round table discussion about just that. Also, on channel catfish, they are generally described as a put and take fish. If you aren't wanting to catch and eat a bunch of them you can wind up with a lot of larger catfish that are hard to catch and compete with bass for forage.

I should have stated this at the start of the post, but I am no expert, and you may want to get some advice on exactly what you want to place in each pond based on pond size and what your goals are for each pond.

Nick,
To me setting out the structure is the fun part. I built some similar to yours and sunk some Christmas trees with concrete bases as well. Being a southern LA boy, I can never get used to seeing that red dirt...