As far as I can tell my SMB are doing great. I honestly haven't fished it much yet as the RES I want to cull didn't become large enough to catch til here recently. We can catch RES about every 2 min if we want to. But as soon as someone catches a 10+" I shut them down and let them apply for that Master Angler award (kids only). So far we've caught 35-40 RES total, and 6 of them have been over 10". The others are around 9.5" and some smaller in size. Anything under 8" goes into my big pond. We've only caught
3 SMB and they were 10-11.5" but I didn't get a RW on them as it was one of the few moments I didn't have a scale with. They look super healthy though. They're a blast. I'm thinking they will keep the RES under 3" under control and anything above that I will control with rod and reel then transport to my larger pond. One of the big reasons I opted to lower my water was to give the SMB a predatory advantage this fall. We'll see soon enough.
