So, I'm back :) With all the free time I have had over the past 20 months, I devoted some of it to redoing our lake.

Quick backstory: My great grandfather built the original lake in 1927. It was about 7 acres. In 1948 my grandfather and uncle expanded it to about 24 acres, and built a small cabin, which also served as the local Boy Scout hut.

My father and I rebuilt the lake in 1997, draining it, restocking, and building a new emergency spillway. After the fishing declined a few years ago, we decided to start over. So in February of 2018 we turned the valve and let the water out to start again.

You can see the valve in the first picture. That valve has been there since 1948 and has only been turned maybe three times. I poured a bottle of motor oil over it, and started spinning the wheel. The flap came straight up without any problems. Then sat right back down in the slots when I cranked it back down. I would have never imagined we could make it work after all that time.

That is TR3 on top of the control structure. We removed the old cedar trees that my grandfather put there in 1948 to hold up the control structre. They were mostly fine, just a bit rotten on the tops. The deck he built there is about 4 feet below the water line (about 16 feet of water here at the deepest point).

Next thing we did was get the dozer in there to build a couple of 20 foot wide shelfs for bream beds. This one was about 150 feet long. We built three of them at different places along the lake, with about 4-6 inches of pea gravel. The bream are already bedding on them now.

Also, that yellow dog is the one I got from Cgrand's last overstock dog sale. Best dog I have ever had

We also built a bunch of brush piles by just cutting down trees and piling them up. I didn't get many pictures. But the biologist who came out to give us recomendations said that the main reason for the fishing decline was lack of cover for the bream. We had a bunch of big grass carp in the lake to deal with the lily pads. And once our original brush piles melted down, the lake bed was clean. And the big bass basically wiped out our bream. So, to keep that from happening this go around, we are making an effort to keep more cover in the lake. And we stocked it with more forage species. To give the bass something to eat without working over the bream so hard.

In September of 2018 we finished our work and closed the wheel without any problems. In October we got a 4" rain and the lake filled up about halfway. This picture shows it about 4 feet from the control platform. So maybe 7 feet from being full. The 24 acre lake drains about 300 acres of hardwood timber. So it fills up fast. That weed is Coffee Weed. Over the summer of 2018 it grew 20 feet tall and got as big around as my wrist at the base. You couldn't even drive through it. It is still out there over a year later. I am sure it will rot down at some point.

Fish stocking time. We put the bream in there in February of 2019. We went with 12,000 coppernose bluegill, 4,000 shellcrackers, and 20,000 bull minnows (for bass forage).

From L to R that's bull minnow, shellcracker (chinqepin), and coppernose bluegill. The advantage of the coppernose is that they are better surface feeders and they take pelleted feed better than traditional bluegill. Or so I was told.

We alos built this nice fishing dock in a quiet cove with afternoon shade, and a gravel shelf for bream bedding.

Now, we wait. We stocked the bream in February. And we started feeding them in May. By June they had become card carrying democrats.

Bream are now 6" long and weigh about 4 ounces.

We also put 1200 bass in about the first week of June. I haven't caught any of them yet to put them on the tape. But the once I have seen I have been shocked at how big they are. I would guess 7-8 inches long and at least a quarer of a pound. They were just over an inch long in June.

We let the kids catch a few for fun. Next summer at this time we will be having fried bream fillets!