Pond Boss Forums POND CONSTRUCTION Renovating a Pond or Lake? My front yard cow pond

I'm going to use this post to keep notes on YP spawn.

Fingerlings and brooders were stocked fall 2019.


2/22/20 Ice out
2/26/20 ST 41.7°F
2/27/20 ST 43.5°F
2/29/20 ST 44.1°F
3/3/20 ST 48.2°F Magic number achieved. Time to drag the pond hopper boat out and start checking for ribbons.
3/4/20 ST 50.0°F
3/5/20 ST 50.0°F Cool day, 30-40mph winds all day.
3/11/20 ST 51.8°F Water still quite stained from rainfall runoff. Haven't spotted any ribbons.

Random observation:
I have some Optimal Starter #3 left over from last summer. Started hand-tossing half a cup or so on 2/28/20. First few times I could see the minnows taking pellets, but no good swirls that would indicate a larger fish. This afternoon (3/2/20) a few minutes after the minnows started to feed they were running for their lives - jumping out of the water, skipping across the surface, etc. The water is too murky from the recent rainfall runoff to tell what was marauding them. It's not likely to have been the RES, so it seems safe to assume the Snipe strain YP came through the winter in good shape.

3/12/20 Was making my lap hand-tossing feed and looking for ribbons and noticed a pair of hand-size RES lurking in a cedar tree. They snuck out real slow and hoovered some pellets. They cruised around for a few minutes then slowly disappeared back into the cedar tree. Both of them looked to be in good condition.

3/31 Repeated heavy rains throughout March kept the water stained. Wasn't able to see any ribbons in the brush that's visible from the bank. There's a lot of brush that can't be seen from the shore, and the muddy ground kept me from getting the pond hopper boat from its parking spot so I wasn't able to check all of the spots that could have been used for spawning. I've been using a torpedo trap off the dock to catch FHM for crappie bait for the past couple weeks. When I pulled the trap today there were half a dozen sunfish fry in the trap. Can't tell if they're BG (hope not) or RES, so I tossed them in the minnow cage to let them size up so I can get an ID on them. Noticed later in the day several schools of sunfish fry hanging in shallow water near the bank. Needless to say I'm eager to get an ID on them. I have a feeling that I'm going to be dealing with a BG problem. As far as the YP go, I'll have to do some trapping later in the year to find out if they pulled off a spawn.

4/14/20 Found this one floating in a tangle of cedar branches. On the bright side, the RES I put in last summer as 1.5"-3" fingerlings are now the size of my hand, and back to their Pac Man behavior at pellet time. Over the past week I've seen as many as 20 of them at a time hanging just under the water's surface soaking up the sunshine.



Never did see any ribbons, but there had to have been at least one. I trapped a dozen-ish yoy YP in late August/early September.