Pond Boss Forums MANAGING AN EXISTING POND Evaluating and adjusting fish populations Newly Stocked Pond with Major Failure

Hello, I first discovered this site a few weeks ago and am amazed by the breadth of knowledge on here! Many of the threads have been incredibly helpful with information. I have had an issue come up this weekend and I decided to turn here for some information and advice.

I built a new 1 acre pond in 2021. Roughly 15-20 feet deep in the deepest location and generally probably around 10-15 feet in most places. It was constructed with sloping walls on most of the sides with a more gentle transition on 2 of the banks. This pond is primarily designed to grow very large bass.

I stocked the pond with 4-6in bluegill, catfish, lots of flathead minnows and a few sterilized grass carp for vegetation control in the fall of 2021. The plan is to introduce 8 - 12 inch bass this spring, after the bluegill have a chance to spawn.

Upon stocking the pond with the current fish, my pond stocking guy told me that we overstocked the pond and I would need to fish it aggressively after the first couple of years to cut down on the bluegill count. Originally the plan was to build a 2 acre pond as opposed to a one acre, however we ended up not being able to do that. However, due to a miscommunication, it was still stocked as a 2 acre pond instead of a 1 acre. No big deal, I was happy to fry up lots of bluegill in a few years.

Fast forward to this weekend. I went out to check the pond water temperature to see if it was warm enough to begin my supplemental feeding program and was devastated to see that one of the walls of the pond (essentially a dam wall) suffered a catastrophic failure. As I mentioned, the walls are sloping and not a deep vertical dive. I lost probably a 30 -35 foot section of the wall that extended probably 10 -15 feet deep (sloping). The overall pond water levels were down probably 5+ feet on average over the 1 acre. Suffice it to say, MASSIVE amount of water escaped the pond. To make matters worse, it was not a slow leak. I went to the pond 2 days before the check it and there were no issues. The water rushed out fast enough to take a tire off of the tire wall I had built for the minnows and leave a large trail of dirt and silt over a very large area.

Which brings me to my issue. I have gone to the pond the last couple of days and verified I still have a good bit of fish in the pond. This can be confirmed visually as well as I have seen quite a few bluegill and a couple of catfish come up to eat food as I utilized the feeder the last couple of days. What I have no idea of however, is how many fish I lost.

Technically, if I lost 50% of the fish, its not the end of the world, its just properly stocked. However, what if I lost 90% of the fish? What is all the bluegill stayed but I lost all the minnows and most of the catfish? My concern is I don't want to add another 50% of optimal stocking levels if I only lost 10% of fish, as I will be greatly overstocked now. However, I also don't want to understock my bluegills and not have enough forage fish for the bass once I put them into the pond. I cant think of any good way to determine how much fish I lost vs what is remaining in the pond. Same with the species, maybe I lost all of the Carp and now wont have good vegetation control. Maybe there are only a couple of catfish remaining out of what was stocked previously.

My dirt guy is going to reinforce all of the walls this week and also line all of the sides with clay to prevent this from happening again.

So I turned to the Pond Boss Forum to ask for some advice on the situation. What are your thoughts?


I included a picture of the failure below for context.