Fish For the Future

 

There used to be a number of ponds across the farm mainly because nearly every farm had one or more for watering livestock or as a water source. But like many industries, farming has changed and thus the need for farm ponds has been reduced. When you combine that with the need to maintain a pond to keep it in working order, we have simply let the ponds live out their useful life and removed them. The one pond where we mostly fished since I was a little kid still exists but the overflow tube on it has rusted out and it would have cost more to repair it than to just build another pond. I wrote about one of my last fishing trips to that pond here, and my attempt to salvage what fish remained. 

Since that time, we have built a new pond in a different location. We don't have a particular need to water livestock or have an alternative water supply anymore but having a place to meet as a family and perhaps catch a few fish seemed appealing enough to justify the cost. 

Last spring, if was finally full enough for us to consider stocking it and so my father and brother saved a few fish from one of the old ponds that had served it's useful life and was being drained and dismantled to transfer to the new pond. They were all bluegill. There were maybe around 50 of them which according to the internet, would take a few years to create a meaningful supply of fish for a healthy bass population. Then I would need to see if there are anymore bass in the old pond to transfer but I knew it was unlikely that I could catch and successfully transport alive enough to build up the population in the new pond without a significant period of years in-between. 

So I started looking at purchasing fish through various local "fish day" events that pop up in the springtime here in rural America. I missed the closest store to the pond that has one and another one an hour away would have one but looking into the logistics of how many fish I could haul in a bucket without oxygenating the water to get them transported to the pond looked like it would not be worth it. I would have to invest in a lot of buckets and auxiliary oxygenation units to safely transport them and at the end of the day, I still wasn't sure there would be enough food for them to eat.

So I looked up the company that provided the fish for the local "fish day" events and found out they also delivered as well as provided customized stocking plans to fit the size of pond we had and could tailor it to our overall expectations. I told them what I hoped to accomplish and after a bit of figuring, they gave me a quote for delivering all of the right quantities of fish that we needed to achieve that goal. To achieve it, we would need:

10 pounds of fathead minnows for food fish

10 pounds of golden shiners for food fish

150 channel catfish 6 to 8" long

400 more bluegill 2 to 3" long

200 sunfish 3 to 4" long

75 large mouth bass 3 to 4" long

The quote was very reasonable considering what I would have to invest in buckets, oxygenators, fish and likely a significant death rate due to the distances involved and so we scheduled a day for delivery that arrived earlier today as I write this.

They arrived at the coordinates that I sent them and transferred the live fish out of their holding tanks and into buckets which were then carried over to the pond and dumped in. In all, it took us maybe 20 minutes to get the fish transferred to their new home where hopefully in a few years, will reach a nice size to allow us to start fishing for them.  

I may still go over to the old pond sometime yet this year to see if any of those big bass remain there but I won't transfer them over, at least not this year. They are big enough that they would gobble up the small bass and catfish we just purchased and put into the new pond and I don't want that to happen.