Pond advice

Southeastern Pond Management manages our 1 acre pond and 9 acre lake.

I'm there everytime they shock them and pick the fish biologist's brain for at least 45 minutes.

Not trying to be a dick, but going off what he's told me over the years for our 1 acre pond, if catching lots of big, quality bass and having healthy, well fed bream is the goal, putting channels in was a bad idea.

It's like he says, a ¾ acre pond only has so much livable space in it, and if big bass is the goal, then putting channels in will hamper that severely. We restarted our 1 acre pond, and I envisioned a channel cat/good bass & bream pond and thought it was achievable with heavy management, but after he gave me a quick, concise tutorial on why that was a bad idea, I changed my mind without a second thought.

In a pond that size, if big, quality bass are the goal, you have to feed your bream, and you HAVE to catch the hell out of the bass. It's much easier to stay on top of the catching, instead of playing catch up. As a matter of fact, playing catch up can be damn near impossible. In many cases they actually recommend nuking the pond and starting from scratch if money is not a huge concern, because they can get you on track much quicker than trying to get back on top of things.

In any body of water, but especially the smaller the acreage, your bream are your forage base and they must be taken care of, and you need to be aware that you don't clean them out when they're on the beds. Stocking a pond that size with shad is not cost effective, but one thing he recommended was stocking the pond with crawfish at 200lbs/acre, especially pre-spawn. They're easy to eat, highly nutritious tootsie rolls for bass, and they really help them rebound after the spawn when they're feeding heavy, which also takes pressure off your newly hatched bream. Our 1 acre pond got all out of whack, we had no bream, tons of bass that were starving (like, finding grass in their stomachs starving) and re-stocked with bream and crawfish and saw immediate results in a season on their weights. We were doing good on keeping our bass, but after building the lake, the pond is inevitably going to revert back.

And that's the crux of most problems with ponds and small lakes: if it isn't fished enough, it will get out of control. Most of the people who wanted to fish the pond only wanted to fish for bream, so that exacerbated the imbalance. I'm strongly considering nuking it, putting in big, marked gravel beds, and turning it into a channel cat and trophy bream pond. With nothing to eat the bream they could overpopulate, but a handful of people can put a hurting on bedded bream gravel beds in a weekend, and there's no shortage of folks who will come lay the hammer to big, bedding bream. Just lay the high protein feed to it and have it to where anybody can go and catch dinner plate bream and eating size cats. That seems to me so much more doable than adding bass into the mix on a small pond, but everyone has their own goals and wants and needs.

But basically, the biologist told me that you either have a bass and bream pond, or a channel cat pond. Trying to split the difference just gives mediocre-to-poor results across the board, and if bass are in the equation, you just about can't catch too many after the 2nd growing season's spawn.

A stunted pond is a process over years;
1- too many bass
2-they eat all forage
3- no food to eat bass starve to death
4- pond overpopulates with remaining forage fish (small fish)

If you’ve got lots of small bass, start catching them and taking them out

,,,pond biologist recommendation

Stick to buying them at the market. Your arse can’t catch fish anywhere

You rang ??