There are several ponds that I use to catch my bait and over half of them have had a substantial winter kill. One pond owner cleaned up 15 5gal buckets of bluegill and bass. Has anyone else experienced this problem? I would like to offer suggestions for these pond owners if there is something they can do, so any pointers on correcting this problem would be very much appreciated. I live about 40 miles north of Omaha.
Completely lost one pond. Catfish to ten lbs, 4-5 lb bass, bluegill by the bucketful as you say. The vultures loved it. This pond went into winter low. Because of the winter, very cold, snow cover just kept getting deeper they croaked. Another pond with some depth did fine (I hope). I am in East Central Iowa. The word is that ponds from here North, East and West will have been decimated. Can't stop it, can't control it unless you aerate a hole in the ice. I will have to restock if fish are available and the price doesn't get out of hand. If we drought out it will be the same thing again come fall if the winter is hard.
Pond up front is about eight feet. Should not have catfish in there, but it is where I put my river caught fish to clean up during the summer. Can never recatch all of them and I really didn't try this fall. Got burnt. The bass and bluegill normally do not have any problem. With runoff and rain this spring that pond is up to the overflow pipe and now 35 feet deep. Pretty, but lifeless. The back pond is about 15 feet. Did not seem to have problems. Have bluegill, hybrid bluegill, shellcrackers, Largemouth and catfish in there. It is aerated from a pump in my barn but I didn't turn it on this winter. I just use this pond as my bait source, bluegill. This year I will catch out some catfish. They are my buddies and I feed them. Fun to watch. I catch out a few and replace them with stockers about 6 inch. I can't stand to eat bass so I just let them keep getting bigger. This pond is now full also, about 22 feet. Won't know how it did till I try and fish it. They are talking late drought here this year and we will have to see how it goes into the winter this fall. May need to turn that aerator on. hate to do that because it stirs up too much bottom sediment. The pond is very fertile and it can cause me to have algae bloom in the spring which can kill 'em as fast as ice can.
I was telling a professor about this post a while ago. He has a pretty small pond that I thought would have had quite a fish kill. It didn't though and I asked him what he did to preserve the fish. He told me that it helps to shovel off the snow every snowfall and to put holes in it - like for ice fishing. Thats just what he said, maybe it'll help your friends.
