Pond Boss Forums INTRO Bob Lusk's blog North Carolina project

Arrived yesterday in Raleigh, NC, drove an hour and a half south to Laurinburg to work on Richmond Mill Lake.
I have written about it in several issues of PB.
This trip was to verify which fish have reproduced.
This morning, Dave Buhler and I took a 20 foot seine and checked the lake and three different ponds.
We found some interesting stuff.
First, we checked a 1/20th acre hatchery pond. It was stocked this spring with 30 4-5" bluegill.
Now, it has several thousand babies, two size classes. We seined a corner and caught 500ish babies, along with several yoy green sunfish (probably left over from draining it this spring) The next pond is a 1/10th acre pond. We caught one size class of baby bluegill, about 1/2" long.
Then, into the 125 acre lake, stocked with a variety of sizes of bluegill, redear, fathead minnows and largemouth bass several months ago. In five very short distance seine hauls we caught 12 species of fish. We only seined in vegetated areas in water less than three feet deep. Baby bluegill dominated the numbers. We caught quite a few banded topminnows, some gambusia, grass shrimp, blackbanded sunfish, dollar sunfish, longear sunfish and a redear. Also caught an 8 inch chain pickerel.
Observed a number of different large underwater insects.
It's an exciting find, all those different species of fish in a 5.3 pH lake with fast flowing black water.

The next day, we did some simple water quality checking. I wanted to determine temperature patterns and see if the pH changes anywhere on the lake. The lake is shaped similar to a salamander, long and skinny with several forks coming in. There are two main feeder creeks, both flowing fairly high rates of water. The pH was consistently 5.4 to 5.8. But, the temperature patterns were interesting. The main body of the lake sat at 85 degrees at the surface, down to two feet. The lake is shallow, mostly tannin colored water. Lots of water is three to five feet deep, but the main creek channel is seven to ten feet deep. In the creek, water temps were 76 at the bottom. As a matter of fact, most water below four feet deep was 76 degrees. As we traveled further up the creek, water was flowing and all of it was 76-77 degrees F.