Thread: pond management

My sister has a small to average size pond stocked with bass and bluegill only. The bass are very healthy but have never seen or heard of one over 2# and 14 or 15 inches long thats been taken out of it. The same is true with the gills, very average to small fish. They do no feeding and the pond is about 13-15years old.
Is it common to only have good bass or good gill fishing but not both in a pond?
Should some of the bass be harvested or all the dink gills be put in the garden? I personally like catching bass better but prefer the gills for table fare. Would adding crappie help or hurt the problem?

My uncle has a pond with gills and bass and a few catfish, and he learned that if you have too many fish and dont keep the population down they dont grow to any size.

My opinion, get rid of the bass. If the pond is less than 10 ac. , and you don't take several bass out each year, they will take over. I found out the hard way. I stocked a sm. pond with hybrid bluegill, & redear the 1st. year, 2 years later, I put in 75-3'' bass. It was fine for about 6-8 years, then I noticed the panfish was thinnig out, and the bass was taking over. I know hybrids don't reproduce like bass but, now I wish I had never put any bass in at all. You can go anywhere and catch 1-3 # bass, but 11"-13" gills, & redear are hard to come by. If you want to control the gill population, use crappies ! Just my opinion.

I can remember an awesome pond we used to fish when I was a kid. It had absolutely huge redear in it, my cousin mounted a 2.4 pound redear from it. We routinely caught 12inch, 1-1.8lb redear in this six acre pond, I believe it was spring fed and just had incredible intangibles to make it a redear lake. Also it wasn't managed or stocked, it was just an awesome lake. They put in crappie and now the redear aren't near what they used to be, the crappie basically took over the lake.

If I had a small pond and was looking to properly stock it, I would go with bass, catfish and redear. Crappie can flat out take over a lake.

You can find a lot of pond managemnet info on-line. Most recommend removing a certain amount of weight of each spiecies per year to avoid over population. We removed two 5 gallon buckets of gills from our old pond that were barely big enough to clean. The fish were stunted and not growing. After 3 years of keeping 50 to 100 gills per year since, the remaining fish are growing including the bass. This is a small very old pond of 1/2 acre.
Just the other way round in my three year old pond, bass are growing at an unbelieveable rate but not the gills or cats. I 'm thinking that we will remove bass starting with the the second year class and any gills and cats we catch plus start a feeding program. Even with all the info availiable it's hard to determind what is best as far as pond management. If we could look through all that water to actually see the fish it would be easier.

sorry it's pondbossthey have a website & a magazine.they can answer all your questions.