Eric, you are so right when you said my current pond is not the pond I had last year. Fish kills really do suck. However, My learning curve over the past 6 yrs should help me grow even larger lmb faster than I did prior to the kill. What lmb that are left in the pond may not be pure Florida's and may not be pure Northern and last spring should have produced my first F1's. I had all of those fish in the pond. So, I plan on going back and adding new Florida's to what strains I have left and so it would be nice if i could have the high forage numbers. The pond does have some nice sized cnbg along with good numbers of other sizes from what I see at the two feeders. But I have no idea if I have what jpsdad says when speaking about to many. How many of the largest bg is to many? In the past years, I would remove 50 or so in the 7" range each year to make room for the new spawned fry. In the past years i have removed those 7" and then early spring add 50 lbs of FHM's to take the pressure off the bg fry. By doing this I have seen really high numbers of 2 to 3" cnbg everywhere a few months later. I will remove some again this year but I have no plans on removing the largest. It goes against what I have understood for the past 5 yrs, I will lose those fish soon enough due to age anyways. I think jpsdad may make a good case but I just can't go against what I have been told from others that are supposed to know the correct path. That is what they do for a living, they made those recommendations to keep the largest, remove some of the smaller sized, the ones the lmb can't eat because they are to large, add the fhm's and watch alot of those smaller forage sized bg show up all over the pond. I will never forget the first time I followed those recommendations made in March and by late June the 3" cnbg were everywhere. Going back, how many lbs of fish per acre is where I get lost in all of this. I have not found a way to figure it out.
