Another seining adventure with NEDOC and NEfish:
Got started about 1230 on 7/9 and decided to seine the east arm of my pond again. The same one we had pulled all of the carp out of before. Well NEfish was a little under the weather
so he didn't get to partake in the carp seine. So we will blame our failure on him. Anyway, this time we attached 2-100' ropes on each side (1 to the float line and 1 to the weighted line) so that we could stand on dry ground to facilitate the pulling of the net. That worked great but.......... as we finished I noticed there were a couple spots the weighted line and float line got tangled and/or crossed. Needless to say, we caught very few fish. In fact 3 was the total. Lesson #2342 in seining: apply nearly all pulling force (or all of it when applicable) to the weighted line. In fact, in the second pond (which I will tell about shortly) we let the float line drag behind with no force at all.
About this time NEfish shows up (looking very poor). His soon to be father-in-law has a pond with an overabundance of small crappie, so we decided to seine there. This pond has a small (30' x 30') island on it so we swam the rope over to it and then pulled one end of the net over. From there, we swam that end of the rope over to the far bank and began pulling the net so that we could span as much of the pond as possible. We had 5 guys and we were all on dry ground pulling. If you have seined before you know that it is almost impossible to pull a 100' net while standing in muck. But this time we only pulled the rope that was attached to the bottom weighted line and let the float line go on its own. It took us about 15 minutes and a whole lot of muscle to get the net worked to the corner of the pond and corral all of the fish. About 10 yds from shore fish began jumping everywhere. Some were even successful in clearing the net and reaching freedom. We pulled the net to shore slowly and had nearly 600-700 fish and 2 snapping turtles nearly the size of trash cans. We grabbed the crappie and hauled 320 of them to a friends pond and threw the BG, LMB and CC back. I am sure I will have more details that I will have to edit in but all in all it was a great day.
ps NEfish, did I hit all of the important stuff?
ps The snapping turtle died from massive cranial trauma
