Pond Boss Forums POND CONSTRUCTION Creating habitat transfering water and fish from an old pond to a new one

a friend of mine has an old established pond in s. ohio, he recently built a new pond withen a few hundred yards of the old one. his plan is to drain the old pond into the new one and sein the fish into the new one. my concern is the old pond is great two pounds and up are the average bass caught with my personal best at six pound one ounce, what if any problems could occur, we realy dont want to lose the old pond but he is determined to do this, its his land and i dont have much say ,but we want it to be as smooth as possible with as few deaths as possible. we are trying to do this in the next few weeks, please give me some good pointes or ideas so that i can help with process.

I'm not one of the experts. Just a rank amateur learning also. Obviously a risk of having both ponds out of balance for a while. I would have been tempted to stock the new one with fathead minnows and bluegill some time before transfering the other fish as I'm guessing that by seining out the fish from the other pond, you'll mainly be transferring the larger fish and not the smaller forage fish they feed upon. Then again, many of the smaller forage fish may flow downstream with the water if he is cutting the dam and it isn't too far (water has to retain some depth + speed and not spread out too much). Pumping/siphoning out the water would better preserve his dam. Is his goal to preserve his fish while he revamps his old pond or just to get his new one off to a flying start?

FWIW: I successfully transferred quite a few fish using a large cattle tank in a pickup truck when I drained one of my ponds. Upon reflection, I'm not sure I did any good as I probably just put the other pond out of balance and over optimal capacity with the introduction of all those. No fish kill, but we're planning to get a bunch back out and have a huge fish fry this year.

Another thing to consider; If your water is fairly warm it's not a good time to be moving fish. You could have very stressed fish and some disease problems, and even some mortality due to moving fish in warm water.

Cecil has one of many good questions I would ask befor " moving the fish and water" How Big is the first lake? How do you plan on moving the water? How do you plan on moving the fish? With the water flow or by seining and transferring by tanks? Yes you do have to move the entire pond (incliding the food chain) with the bass. Will you cause and extreme water turbidity by moving this water to the new pond? Be very careful of the weather forecast when planning this event. Heat, rainfall, cloudy calm conditions ... anything that may cause additional stress to your fish. Does he plan on redoing the first pond? Why not have two!!!