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The Stocking of the Pond
Life came to the pond even before I stocked it. There were tons of toads and frogs, water
beetles, turtles, dragon flies, etc. Even if I wouldn’t have stocked the pond, nature has a way of spreading
and the pond would have eventually wound up with fish from birds carrying their eggs to the pond. So even though right now I know what’s in there, someday I won’t.
If I would have stocked the pond how they wanted me to it would have cost around $4,000. Doing it the “Sam” way only cost a cool $850.00. I stocked the following fish and animals:
100 standard cray fish
100 BIG “Mini lobster” cray fish (see picture above)
100 Fresh water mussels
100 Large mouth bass
200 Bluegills
100 Channel catfish
1000 Fat head minnows
48 Shiners
Two breeds of snails that I collected from another pond and bred in an aquarium.
I purchased the fish from a hatchery located in the middle of the state. I had thought about catching my own fish from other ponds but ruled against it. For starters it wouldn’t take me so long for the bluegills but the bass and catfish it would. Plus there’s the whole “Minimum size” law for taking bass and catfish from public waters so I’d be in effect poaching. Plus you can’t sell any fish or other wildlife in PA unless you can prove they are not from the wild.
The fish come in bags that are filled with 2 gallons of cold water and pure oxygen. These bags are then placed into Styrofoam coolers. A whooping 100 fish come per bag -
and they can be sent UPS to you if you don’t want to pick them up.
We went and picked the fish up. My truck was in the shop so I had to take my
Riviera. Needless to say, the car was packed to the max with fish and sitting a few inches lower to the ground.
Because I was in my car and it had just rained I didn’t want to risk getting the car stuck on the dirt road going down to the pond. This means we had to walk the fish down about 300 yards. On top of that while we were bring the first round of fish down to the pond my upper neighbor’s dog decided to pee on the other coolers.
We took the fish out of the coolers and stuck the bag in the water to equalize the temperature. Luckily the two waters were almost the same temperature to begin with so it didn’t take long. Slowly but surely we released the fish and cray fish. We walked around the pond and tossed the mussels into the water. I often see fish hanging out by the waters edge. Hopefully they’re smart enough not to get caught by a fisherman. =)
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