this is a long time coming, and fun for me to share with you guys.
i finally made contact and visited a somewhat local fish farm today (not easy to do around these parts). not a retail place, not open to public, he mostly supplies food industry (asian markets being the biggest purchaser), and pond and game fish stocking is only a minor percentage of his business. saw some tanks full of sturgeon, hybrid carp, CC, LMB, spotted bass, and BG. The sturgeon were really cool to see. Unfortunately he did not have any gams or RES ready for sale, but (JEFF) we can probably place order to pick up later this spring.
anyhow, i told him i was looking for a mix of BG from YOY to adult if he could spare them, and wanted to stock ~1,000 fish. He had recently seined his BG pond, and had 3 tanks with mixed age (2) year classes (~1" to 4" fish), he'd had such a good spawn last year that "they were on sale" ~0.30c a piece
which was nice cause he quoted me 0.50c apiece last year. he was a nice guy to do business with and REALLY generous with the scoops. we counted one of the "lighter" scoops and it had 159 fish in it, so we figured i was getting about 150-200 fish per scoop. he loaded me up with 10 scoops (probably between 1,500 and 2,000 fish!) for $300.
we split them into two double thick plastic bags with about 5 gallons of water each, forced the air out then injected pure O2 and sealed them off, put them in styrofoam coolers. my drive time was about an hour back to my place.
I put the bags in the pond water to acclimate about 15 minutes, managed a couple pics, and then released my new brood into their wild new wonderland. wow, and only 6 little floaters, i am a proud papa this evening.
