Pumping out Pond

Curious - why do you want to remove the catfish prior to stocking bluegill/bass? Are these channel catfish? Do you know if the catfish are reproducing in the pond?

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Pumping out Pond

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We actually did this a few years back. Pulled a net across the lake and walked it across to corral the catfish into small area. Took about four of us.
Then, we scooped them out with buckets into a truck with a large live well. A local restaurant bought them all.

Pump it out. Pick up all the catfish. Rinse off all the mud then place on ice. Find a local fish market that will buy them from you in the rough, or give away to friends. Only way to get them all out is to drain the pond. Using a seine/net will miss quite a few.

Absolutely don't put crappie in a half acre pond.

Curious why OB doesn't just add Rotenone to pond? If you want to catch some catfish first just start feeding them in an area you can get a fish seine into and come in behind them and drag them to the bank.

Few additional points:
- Channel catfish are cavity spawners and they should not be reproducing in smaller ponds unless there are cavities (from erosion) in the levee, large empty containers, or hollow logs in the pond. Remove or fix those issues, and channel catfish reproduction should not be an issue.

- there is no better way to kill un-wanted fish than a dry pond, but that can be difficult to achieve in ponds without drains. Certainly pump as much water out as possible, and if you can’t get the puddles or low spots to dry out, then treat puddles with rotenone to kill the remaining fish if you can obtain it, but rotenone is a restricted-use chemical that requires a pesticide applicators license to purchase. An alternative is to use a high concentration of concentrated swimming pool chlorinated products, granular or liquid, in the “puddles” to kill any remaining fish. This is important, particularly if you have a green sunfish or bullhead catfish (yellow, brown, or black catfish) contamination problem.

- as stated by others, never stock crappie in a small pond. Usually, 20 to 25 acre lake, some professionals say 60 acre + lakes, is considered to be a minimum size for crappie stocking.

Additionally, bass-bream combinations are not recommended for ponds smaller than 1 acre surface area. Now some do it, and have a bit of success, but the the probably of failure is higher in small ponds- this largely b/c of the low number of largemouth bass stocked in a small pond. Losing a few too many bass, for any reason, can easily disrupt the fish population balance in a small pond resulting in over-population and stunting of bream. This is why fisheries biologists/aquacullurists usually recommend stocking channel catfish only in ponds smaller than an acre, and certainly less than a 1/2 acre.

- And “Way_South” did the fisheries professionals you communicated with also tell you stock largemouth bass in the pond after it is expanded and stocked with channel cats and red-ear sunfish - the sunfish (bream) need a predator in the pond to keep their numbers in check after they reproduce to prevent stunting of the bream population.

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I've got 1/3 acre pond I'm going to expand when we build on the lot. It's been left alone and is overrun with green sunfish. I'm probably going to rent a trash pump or two and drain once we move in and I'm there to mess with it. I've talked to the aquacologists at LSU and other wildlife biologists. I'm going with red ear sunfish and channel cat. Once it's drained I'll make sure there is nowhere for catfish to spawn and add what I take out yearly. My goal is nice panfish for kids and frying.

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I did this on my pond back in August. Renting was my first thought. The 3” pump from Harbor Freight is the ticket. I think it was $289. It would run 1.5 hours on a tank of gas at 3/4 throttle. Put a strainer over the suction hose before you start. It took awhile but worked great.

If your pond is only a 1/2 acre, the carrying capacity (max pounds of fish the pond can support) is no more than 400 to 500 pounds per surface acre (unless you are feeding the fish), and if the pond is in the acid soils, piney woods area in the Covington area, less than that. Point being you probably have a lot less pounds of catfish in the 1/2 acre pond than you think you have, maybe 200-250 pounds max. I think you could invite friends, family etc over and catch the vast majority out by hook and line pretty quickly. Not likely anyone with a commercial interest in the fish would be interested in so few fish.

Though not impossible, I think it’s not likely channel catfish are not the cause of your pond being “cloudy”, which I assume you mean that it is “muddy” (clay turbidity). I’ve seen 1000s of acres of commercial catfish ponds with several thousand pounds+ per acre of catfish that don’t exhibit “mud/soil” turbidity.

Most common causes of sediment pond turbidity are poorly vegetated watershed, and sometimes trash fish, like common carp, buffalofish, that find their way into the pond. Sometimes the nature and chemistry of the clay soil, can cause muddy condition, in which clay remains suspended in the water column, and if so, there are a few chemical approaches of flocculating the sediment out of suspension to clear it up. If the “cloudy” water is caused by planktonic algae, a different approach is required.

If your pond is in the Covington area, the LSU AgCenter has a fisheries/aquatic professional extension agent Carol Franze that can provide you some additional assistance. LINK