Pond Boss Forums INTRO Questions & Observations Fascinating Aeration Bonus

Just installed an aeration system into my 30 acre 30 foot deep gravel pit. This gravel pit connects to another gravel pit by a small shallow canal, the aeration has been running 24/7 for the past 3 weeks and literally every diffuser is choke full of 2" Gizzard Shad getting pummeled by bass non-stop. The bass just sit there and gulp down shad all long. Pretty cool stuff.

WOW!

Do you have any video, or can you see this from the surface?

The bass just porpoise through, sometimes coming almost out of the water, of course they don't bite very well given the amount of food they have, yes I was hoping to make a video and condense it so others could see............

I have witnessed a conveyor belt type of delivery of YOY BG coming up from some depth to the surface around my diffuser bubble streams. For some reason the small BG seem to ride this ride over and over. We witness this when we glide up very carefully in the boat. Sometimes the fish stop temporarily but if we sit still and the boat does not move much they will start up again and we can observe them. Looks like BG 1-2" long, hundreds and hundreds of them.

Then along towards evening very often we observe LMB hitting the surface around the diffuser and a wave of BG, some clearing the water, scared in a frenzy ahead of the bass.

The small fish seem to like something around the diffusers (maybe O2, maybe food????) and like to hang out there.

I too notice any current of any kind attracts the shiners. When I don't want to consume the full ability of my well in filling the pond, I just run a garden hose into the pond and fill slowly over several days. Just the small stream from the garden hose into the pond produces a boil of GSH fry all furiously swimming in formation against the current.

I also notice that in my aerator boil the the goldfish that are left want to stay right in the moving water and you see on the edges of the column lots of ripples where minnows feed on the water that is coming to the surface.

I've seen the same thing with my FHM. They gather by the thousands in the aerator bubbles. They don't like the canoe so it's hard to see from the surface but with a gopro it's easy to watch them. No clue why they gather there, snrub's guesses seem likely but I've got no definite answer.

When I pump creek water in with my 2" pump, sometimes I see CC swimming in the current, maybe 25-30 feet out from the discharge.

I will be curious to see if my bass put on weight, due to the fact that they do not have to chase shad around 30 acres of water, it's almost like feeding bluegill, they just stay there and get fat.

i have a friend here in alabama that has a 30 acre rock quarry that is about 100ft deep. just curious how you keep a plankton bloom dense enough to feed shad in your quarry? he doesn't think he can fertilize enough to get a sufficient bloom.

My lake takes a a lot of runoff from a soybean field and a golf course, we were getting Planktonic Blooms/ Blue green algae blooms that were getting worse and worse, time will tell if the Aeration makes the lake to infertile, but I seriously doubt it.

My SMB hammer golden shiners around the diffuser when it is running, it is fun to watch.