Pond Boss Forums MANAGING AN EXISTING POND Corrective stocking Bullhead / Stunted Bluegill

Dangit, you want large BG but your pond is primed for growing huge LMB. It will be a long road to get where you want go. The way to look at the number is this. You need 50 to 80 lbs/acre of LMB. If say the average length of your BG and BH is 4", you need a minimum of 16" LMB. A 16" LMB weighs about 2.25 lbs. So in this case you need 20 to 25 of them. 16" LMB could gain 2 lbs in a year in a bow filled to gills with forage of 4" in length. Problem with few large bass is that the BG reproduction will pile up in the 3" range as the LMB get larger.

You may be better served to drain the pond and kill it out. Then you could stock say 150 LMB/acre fingerlings and 600 BG/acre fingerlings. At this number of LMB, the growth of the LMB would begin to stall at about 10". At this length they are large enough to produce offspring. Just remove LMB > 12" and you will have large BG. Think about how long it will take to get from where you are now by first growing massive LMB and then trying to work that population of LMB to larger numbers of small LMB. You can have 3/4 lb BG in a year if you kill and start over but it will be many years and much effort before you can transform the pond in its present condition.

If you really want to do this without killing the pond first, I have some ideas. But first you need to have a good sense of how the lengths of your fish are distributed. It may be that LMB will have to be so large that they cannot be sourced readily.