Pond Boss Forums MANAGING AN EXISTING POND Evaluating and adjusting fish populations Catfish problem

Kind of depends on what your goals are and how well your LMB do in controlling the YOY BG. Last year I had a good class of BG so was removing a lot of the female BG and returning the males to the water to get bigger. Only putting the best of the best females back for brood stock. The ones that had the characteristics I liked. This year I have been returning both male and female because of my increase in LMB I am catching not nearly as many small BG so I think I might need all the forage from the BG I can get.

Kind of depends on if you want to focus on catching large BG, or focus on catching large LMB, or focus on high catch rates (is what I like, I'm not a trophy angler), or focus on some sort of balance of LMB and BG fishing. Then once you know what you are managing towards there are hundreds of guys on here a whole lot smarter than I am about how to reach those goals.

I just mostly kind of bumble along and get lucky with what I do once in a while.

I will say that one of my accidents has worked out really well. I have about 5 acres of water total with it in several different ponds. 3 acres, 1 acre, another 1 acre and a couple of tiny ponds of 1/10th and 1/20th acres each. Of the 5 ponds they all have very different characteristics. They fish different, sometimes one pond biting a lot better than another. If I only had one pond I might think my management was success or failure based on that one pond. With 5 ponds that all act completely different even though they are right near each other I know that a lot of my actions had nothing to do with how some of the things turned out. One has weeds, another one doesn't. One is clear while another is muddy. One has a good algae bloom while another is too clear. My ponds are about like brothers and sisters. You can see a family resemblance but they all act different. I think that is really cool. If one is covered in nasty FA, some of the others will not be and I can enjoy them. So having multiple ponds has been one of my success stories. And the only reason I have them is because my location did not allow one bigger one. Another management by accident success story of mine.