HBG Growth

Comment

Comment by Dan Welch on March 14, 2016 at 4:51am

Jim Gronaw, that is a STUD! I DO feed my fish pellets on a frequent basis. Not everyday, but a couple of handfulls a few times a week. My pond is surrounded by pasture thats full of grasshoppers and other bugs that I'm sure find their way into the pond. I've been known to catch a grasshopper for bait from time to time, not as easy a task as when I was a kid. Another thing I have noticed is crawfish chimneys in my pasture, sometimes far removed from the pond. Maybe I have some "Mud Bugs" in there that they're eating too! I don't know a lot about crawfish, but I thought they all needed to live in water.

Comment by Walt Foreman on March 13, 2016 at 10:24pm

Sure thing, Dick, will do.

Comment by dick tabbert on March 13, 2016 at 9:04pm

Please keep me updated Walt.

Comment by Walt Foreman on March 13, 2016 at 8:48pm

Dick, it's too early to say for sure, but so far it's looking like the hand-painteds' cold tolerance is better than that of coppernose.  I base this in large part on the fact that I have 500 or so of them in a concrete raceway that's only three feet deep, and which is fed by spring water that barely gets above the low sixties in the heat of the summer...The spring is in the fifties when it comes out of the ground; it flows into a .1-acre pond right above the raceways, and then into them.  I didn't measure the water temperature in the raceway this past winter but considering it heats up to ten degrees or so above the temperature the water is coming out of the ground in the summer, I'm guessing the water got down into at least the upper forties in that raceway this winter.  And yet every time I went down there to check on them, every one of those hand-painteds came racing up to where I was standing to cadge for pellets.  They looked completely unfazed by the cold.  They''re a pretty awesome fish.

Comment by Slip Sinker on March 13, 2016 at 8:15pm

…wow ... six inches takes 6 yrs in michigan

Comment by dick tabbert on March 13, 2016 at 7:26pm

Wow fantastic growth in 5 months. I assume that is a southern hardy fish right walt?.

Comment by Walt Foreman on March 13, 2016 at 6:56pm

I don't know if I shared this on here previously, but we didn't have our first hatch of hand-painteds until the last week of May last year.  (They were stocked into the pond in October 2014.)  From the first hatch I observed the last week of May, when I started seeing a bunch of 1/2" long fry, through mid-September there were at least four other discrete hatches, possibly five, so that the pond was swarming with hand-painteds by September.  Several from the first hatch the end of May had already reached six inches by mid-October.  So, from fry to six inches in five months...

Comment by Tony Livingston on March 13, 2016 at 6:22pm

Agreed Walt. Please keep us in the loop regarding the hand painted.....very curious and excited!

Comment by Walt Foreman on March 13, 2016 at 5:37pm

Tony, I agree that hybrids can produce great fishing with meticulous management - you're proof of that.  I just know that the average pond owner is not going to manage his pond as closely as you do, and therein lies the potential for failure.  It's much more common for me to encounter a client's pond in which hybrids are present, in which they are badly stunted and so far gone in outbreeding that rotenone is the only option, than it is to find a pond that still has large hybrids.

I think I may be closer than some realize to having two-pound pure-strains in quantity.  I caught a northern-strain from my best pond in June 2014 that Bruce opined was well over two; and the two best coppernose from that same pond last year weighed 30.4 and 31.8 ounces.  I don't think one would call the latter two anything other than two-pound bluegill; they're not pound-and-a-halfers, nor are they pound-and-three-quarters; if it were a math equation they would round up to two pounds.  

And that's a one-acre pond.  I made a blog post a week or so ago about the property that it looks like I'm about to move my guide business to, and I'll have nearly three times as much water, and a drastically better starting point than what I had with the property where I presently guide.  

One other minor note: coppernose and northerns ain't the only pure-strain bluegill out there; and based on our first crop last year, hand-painteds may have a faster growth rate than even coppernose.

Comment by dick tabbert on March 13, 2016 at 5:19pm

Craig that's how it starts 1 pond then 2 then so on until your money is all gone and believe me that don't take long..

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