Appreciate all the input here. As you can guess, the turbidity is affecting every aspect of my fishery. I notice several observations.. #1, the SMB are not blasting the huge schools of FHM and GSH like they were as the turbidity has come on somewhat slowly. Last year early in the year I felt my forage base was falling apart (being consumed) and was concerned about numbers. SMB have not shown lower WR's until the last dozen or so fish caught in maybe the last 3 weeks. The YP I can get on a worm are 90-ish, neither them nor BG and RES are feeding regularly now. I have craws from hell waving at the bank within 30 secs of throwing feed, like hundreds of them. I've continued to trap and I've found something that is working quite well on the lobster-size craws and that's the std minnow traps with the funnel cut to open up further.
Small kids socks with dog food ty-wrapped inside works very well. I can throw out 5-6 traps so they are just at surface (top of trap), and as I set say 5 traps in 20 minutes, the first set is full of craws. Setting all night is completely unnecessary as they are loaded in 15 minutes. I'm getting close to 200lbs caught and it's not slowing down.
I have given 7 bucket loads away to mostly wildlife and parks folks that are wanting them to eat. I added 4 more nearly full buckets to my floating pen tonight with zipper top.
I still have my aerator off to help things settle and I don't know how long I should continue with that..?? Surface temp was 82 before sundown tonight.
I have (I believe) 3 large CC left in pond and I wish I knew what they were eating when not sucking pellets off the top at feeding time. If I could confirm they were most effective on the craws I could very easily add some 5-6lb (or much bigger CC). I can also easily add some female only LMB but I can't help but think they are going to clean house on my YP abundance first-and probably some 8-12 " SMB and of course some 1yr old RES.
I think plan "A" for now is to continue trapping the craws until it obviously slows down somewhat.
I have to wonder if the craw die-off I had early in the spring had something to do with the numbers present.
A last observation I'll add is I wear some winter leather gloves so I can quickly sort these as I dump them into a small kiddie pool and these bigger craws will make you piss yourself if you let them grab a finger even with the heavy gloves..
