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Pond is full, this is how it looks.

Beach/swim area




The whole pond

Very nice

Good thing you made your dock heavy enough that it won't float away now that the pond is full!

Great looking water and I'm a huge fan of the use of the riprap.

I like that the stone is good for little fish/tadpoles/crawdads to hide in also helps keep water clean and slows erosion. My wife just likes the way it looks!

First time ice fishing this pond ever today. Ice is over 6" thick, fishing was just crazy!
Caught dozens and dozens of big fat perch...all catch and release this year, I need them to spawn good this spring.
Saw a few schools of Red Ear on the camera but they weren't having any of it, also some big shiners and some huge crappie...didn't see any of the walleye where we were fishing.



















The fish seem to be growing well, next year we will eat some. This is going to stay a perch/smallie/walleye pond.

Great report about your new pond fishery adventure. Your son will really enjoy catching those fish over then next several years and beyond. Good job of growing some nice fish and reporting back to us. Looking forward to more of your fishery reports.

Back in my day, if we wanted to see fish while ice fishing, we had to get our head cold and wet.

Great report!!!

I forgot to mention all the bullfrog tadpoles that were swimming by the other day on the camera.


After hearimg how good the ice fishing was my oldest son came up Saturday afternoon to geta look at the perch. It was cold...the wind chilled us out after an hour.The holes would slush and freeze over in just a few minutes.
Ice was around 8" or better, we started out without much luck didn't have the fish finder or camera like the youngest son did so were fishing old school. We moved over just off the big rock pile on bottom where we caught them the other day and it was on. All were nice, fast action.







And then I caught this one! My personal best ever, I have never even seen one this big caught in person before. 12"



The sunrise and sunsets over the pond are just spectacular...Saturday night.




Two years ago we stocked 150 4"-6" perch in pond and the youngest son threw in a dozen that were around 9" last spring. I try and hand feed everery morning and evening during the warm months off the dock when I can and they come up like piranhas.They quit coming up to feed in early October when it started getting cold. I can't wait to see what they are like a couple years from now. We are planning on doing some type of slot limit on the harvest late fall or next winter, maybe keep 9"-11" to eat and bigger and smaller will go back?

I'll let Dr. Perca make the ultimate recommendation here but the 9-11 sounds reasonable but I believe there will be an abundance of males well under that (5-8"maybe) not sure how the 9-11 would/could skew the numbers.
See what Cody thinks.

Ice fishing next winter and maybe even in summer/fall we should be able to about sex them as we catch them? I'm all for thinning the males down, then after a couple years using the 9-11 slot just release the big females keep big males?
Goal is to have plenty of perch fry for recruitment and for SMB to eat up.
Our original stocking in this pond wasn't very big wanted to give them room to grow. We also have a pretty good FHM and GSH population of all sizes I saw big schools in beach area all summer, along with crawdads and bullfrog tadpoles. .

H20,
with the help of some guides and pictures from this forum I felt pretty comfortable sexing perch especially in the late fall when the egg sac helps confirm females. This link used to show good diagrams and pictures of what the urogenital pore looked like. But photobucket has taken our pictures hostage and added a watermark so sadly the pictures are distorted. There probably are other threads in the archives with better pictures of YP anatomy but with wintertime YP you should be able to confidently separate male from female.

Your YP look very healthy and happy. I'm curious what is in their stomachs if you decide to release to the grease.

see this link:

https://forums.pondboss.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=375752

Thanks, very informative link.

First winter with pond full and the sunrise and sunset pics this time of year over the pond are pretty neat.

Awesome!!!