Advice on Fishing Pond/Lake

   / Advice on Fishing Pond/Lake #21  
Another thing you can do, if you're up for it, is do a fish kill and get rid of everything and start over. Then you can re-stock with bass, bluegill and channel catfish for a start. Do that in the proper balance, and with just a few years you'll have nice fish to catch and eat.

You could also do a mass netting and take out as many small fish as you can and throw the larger ones back.

All kinds of options. Best to get a good count of what's in there now before you start. There might be a simple fix.

Again, your DNR or county extension agent can point you in the right direction.
 
   / Advice on Fishing Pond/Lake #22  
MossRoad came the closest to what is happening in your pond. The rule of thumb is 100 pounds of predator fish per acre for ideal growth of your predator fish. With your pond being 8 acres, that means you want the total weight of all the predator fish in the pond to be around 800 pounds. Since you cannot catch and weigh all of them, that's just a guideline to let you know where you want to be.

Since you are catching small bass, you know that you have plenty of feeder fish. Adding more will not increase the size of your predator fish. In fact, it will allow more of them to survive and make things even worse.

Bass have a weird thing about the size of the food that they eat. For a bass to grow, it's food has to grow. Small food means small bass. The goal is to allow your feeder fish to get bigger. This only happens when you remove predators from the pond. You cannot stop them from reproducing, so you have to start removing them by the hundreds to get to where they will not put so much pressure of the feeder fish. Once the feeder fish start to grow, the bass will start to grow.

Secondary importance to feeder fish is having places to hide. This is commonly called structure. Logs, stumps, old Christmas trees, large pipes, docks and just about anything else that can be put into a pond for fish to hide in, or creates escape paths for the feeder fish to get away from the predators, will increase the size of the feeder fish.

The most obvious thing for you to do is to start fishing. Never put a bass back into the pond. At my pond, the only rule that I tell friends that fish in it is to keep everything that they catch. On a good day, we might take out 20 or more small bass. But even if we only catch a few, that's better then nothing. We went from only catching one pound bass for years, to slowly working our way up to 3 pound, then 5 pound and now 7 1/2 pound bass. This has taken years to achieve, and hundreds of small bass have been removed. My pond is 4 1/2 acres, so about half of what you are having to deal with.

You can also contact a fish biologist, or person that manages ponds. They can come out with a boat that drops an rod into the water and electrocutes the fish. It stuns them to floating to the surface, where it's easy to scoop them up with a net. The one time that I did this, we where just identifying and counting the fish in a 25 acre pond and weighing them to determine what's in there. Each time the water was zapped, I would scoop up a couple dozen fish. If you can do that on your pond, that would give you a huge jump in getting your pond where it needs to be.

This is my wife with her 7 1/2 pound bass from our pond.

View attachment 689987

One thing that always seems to be universal - people are always happy after catching a fish!

Great picture.

MoKelly
 
   / Advice on Fishing Pond/Lake #23  
With bass that size - I'd be swimming with my tenny shoes on. I've sat on my dock - feet in the water. Wake up to open another brewski - notice bass swimming around my toes. So far nothing much over 8" to 10". A 7 1/2 pounder - I'd chap my backside getting my feet out of the water.
 

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