Many people consider a day on the water with a good friend, a cold drink, and fish on the hook a small piece of heaven. While we are blessed in Lincoln County to have extensive water access on the lake, many good fishing opportunities present themselves in farm ponds and other inland areas. In order to establish a healthy stocked pond, there are several things that owners should consider.
First, decide what types of fish you want to stock, and whether your pond is large enough and an appropriate environment for them. Also consider how extensively you are willing to manage problems like muddiness and plant growth. Most of the ponds in our area are stocked with bream and largemouth bass. Pond management can be extensive if you want it to be, from fertilizing, liming, weed control, water sampling, aeration, and more, but many ponds are going to be self-sustaining once established. It is possible to have a decent fishing pond with little to no maintenance.
Stocking your pond may take a year to do correctly. Typically, we recommend stocking bream (1-2 inches) in the fall and early spring so they can spawn before you add largemouth bass (4 in) in early summer. Catfish (8in) can be stocked in fall and winter. If you want to help manage aquatic plant growth, consider adding triploid grass carp to your fish population. The stocking rates on a 1-acre unfertilized pond are: 500 bream (80% bluegill, 20% red-ear sunfish) to 50 largemouth bass, with the optional addition of 5 sterile grass carp.
In addition to starting out with the proper stocking rates of fish species, it is essential that you then harvest the correct ratios of fish. Bream serve as a forage species for largemouth bass, and must be present in enough quantities for bass growth. However, too many bream will overpopulate the pond and stunt their own growth. To maintain correct populations, it is important to consistently harvest intermediate bream (4-6 inches) and bass (14-18 inches) to limit competition with the larger trophy fish. The recommended harvest rate on a 1-acre unfertilized pond is 40 pounds of bream (~120 fish) and 10 pounds of bass (~5-8 fish) every year.
The types and sizes of fish that you do catch on your pond can be very telling as to what is going on with your populations. If you are harvesting lots of smaller bream (3-5 inches) and very few bass, it means your bream population is too large and overcrowding the pond. If you are catching large bream (greater than 1/3lb) and small bass (less than 1lb), odds are that your bass population is overcrowded. If you’re catching a lot of crappie, sunfish, carp, shiners, and others, it means these undesirable species are competing with your bass and bream populations. If you consistently catch bream that are 6 inches or larger as well as different sizes of bass (averaging 2 lbs.), your pond’s fish population is well balanced. The good news, is that if your pond is out of balance, the solution is to harvest more of the overpopulated species!
Managing your pond can take dedication to keeping record of your harvests in order to maintain the correct populations and develop trophy fish. Please join us on September 23 from 12-2PM for a pond management webinar (via Zoom) discussing the ins and outs of fishing ponds. Contact uge3181@uga.edu or 706-359-3233 to register.
