My 1.75 ac pond had a lot of watershield in all areas under 6' in depth. By summer it would be impossible to fish from the bank. Normal water visability is about 3-4' except when the weeds die in fall and I get a bloom - then the visability drops to about 2'.

As noted in other threads I treated one bank with Navigate herbicide and it pretty much killed all weeds on the bank treated and about 95% of the weeds in rest of the pond. I found I could get a bloom when fertalizing the few weeks after most of the weed died.

Now some of the weeds have grown back - about 15% of what it had before but enough so I can't get a bloom fertalizing. It seems like a losing fight to try to keep pond in bloom so I am leaning towards keeping about 30% or shoreline clear and just letting weeds grow elsewhere as the weeds seem to provide a lot of habitat for the small fish. I am feeding about 10lbs of fishfood each day - I can over feed without too much worry.

I'm curious if there has been any studies of how much weeds like watershield provide in the way of fish nutrition vs. a bloom?