I Built a 5 Acre Pond 2 Years Ago - Then This Happened

Folks at home welcome back to the Crimson Oak Pond and I've got some exciting news today our two pet bass that we call Johnny and June started the spawn in process in one of our previous videos and just like that we have dozens of baby bass swimming around in Cedar Falls man I love seeing that and speaking of pet bass the bass that we called tiger is getting moved out of the 300g aquarium into his new home and you'll be seeing that in just a minute and you'll also be seeing a strange accident where I had a boat flip over on me and things could have gotten really bad and today marks the 2-year anniversary of the Crimson Oak Pond that's hard to believe but it was actually 2 years ago to the day that we stocked the 2-in Tiger Bass into the pond and if you guys recall the first bass that we ever caught out of the pond was named tiger obviously because he's a tiger bass and we wanted to get a little better look at the characteristics of these Tiger Bass so we started him out in a 55 gon aquarium and quickly got to see some of his aggression feeding on different things things like minnows and worms and one of the genetic traits of a Tiger Bass is they also grow really fast so we moved them into the 300-gallon aquarium and that's where he's lived the past year but since it was his 2-year anniversary we decided to release him back into the pond and I asked you all in the last video if you would rather just release him into the 5 acre Pond or into the newer Cedar Falls Pond and the overwhelming majority said Cedar Falls so here's one last look at Tiger in the 300g aquarium today's your big day body so I started out by pumping some of his aquarium water into this holding tank and here he is Mr tiger he's got a little different color complexion than what I was expecting probably due to those lights in the aquarium but time to make our short little journey to the pond another thing I love about this truck is it's got 120 volt Outlet that'll make sure he doesn't run out of bubbles on the trip and I also don't want him jumping out of the holding tank riding down the highway so we're going to tape it closed all right tiger made it back out here to the farm he's doing good so this is this tank water that came from the aquarium this is water from Cedar Falls it's a little bit warmer so we're going to slowly start pouring some of this in to help him get acclimated to the temperature and the new parameters of that water all right I slowly acclimated him for about 2 hours you can see the holding tanks full of water now so we're about to release them and get a quick weit before we do all right tiger weighs 1.74 lb and there's one good last look at him got enter his new Pond right here in the shallow area we enjoyed the past couple years buddy hope you enjoy your new home so I was happy to see him hanging out here in the shallow area of the pond so I could keep a close eye on him and it didn't take long for our other two pet bass Johnny and June to show up and they're two friendly little guys I'm hoping that everybody will get along but I'm sure it's a little bit of a shock for Tiger to see other fish because he hadn't seen any since that little bitty bluegill over a year ago but I'll be keeping an eye on him throughout the day making sure that he acclimates like he should so I took some underwater video a couple days later and Tiger's just as happy as could be he spends most of his time hanging out with the other two bass and you even get a really good look here at the big male tilapia that we added last week and I love to see him doing his job that's one of the main reasons we added him in here is because they feed primarily on algae and he's going to help us keep this Pine clean so I was out here at the pond and I noticed a bunch of small fry hanging out right here at the surface and I thought there's no way that that could be little bass but I wanted to put an underwater camera in there just to double check because they were hanging out around the same lily pads that Johnny and June were spawning around about a month ago and I was blown away because as soon as I put the camera underwater the little school of bass I swam right up and for those of you that have been subscribed for a while you know we've been trying to have a bass spawn for years now our two original pet bass Bonnie and Clyde almost spawned once in our 300-gallon aquarium they attempted to in the backyard pond but we've never had a successful bass spawn until now but they're pretty vulnerable at this stage all the other Predators like bluegills will eat them and potentially even bass when they get bigger so now my question for you guys is what do you think we should do with them I could scoop a few of them out put them in the 300-gallon aquarium I could also put a few in the Wetland filter so Truman can have some buddies or I could just leave them here in Cedar Falls until they get a little bit bigger and then possibly release them into the 5 acre pond so let me know what you guys would like to see in a comment down below so now it's time for an update on a dangerous series of events that took place that could have ended up really really bad for me but everything started when our new volcano pump began acting a little strange so I killed the power to it hopped in USS sah and the first thing I wanted to do was ride out and check on the anchor ropes because my first thought was whenever you're pumping that volume of water through a pump those anchor ropes have to be tight so I eased out there and I grabbed one of the ropes and there was a little bit of slack in it and when I put the smallest amount of tension on that rope I noticed that water started coming in over the back of the boat and in my mind I thought no big deal I'm 15 ft away from the island I'll just head over there and drain it out everything happened so fast that I really didn't have time to react and before I knew it the boat had slipped over on top of me but as I was trying to get out from under the boat I got a little Tangled Up In The Anchor rope that I was out there adjusting but I still wasn't panicking yet until the big Muck Boots that I was wearing started filling up with water and it's one of those unique things where your brain slows down time during an accident but thankfully I got untangled got out from under the boat and I was able to use it to catch my breath and then made that swim back to the island so I'm very thankful that things didn't turn out worse it just shows how quickly things things can go from good to bad when there's water involved so after that scare we retired USS Sarah for today and I called my good friends over at Southeastern Pond and they always have the perfect equipment for these jobs they had this nice boom lift off the front of their boat that they could use to lift the pump up in the air and maneuver it around so if you're a pond owner you're familiar with Murphy's Law anything that can go wrong in nature will and our plan was to add a couple extra anchors to our volcano pump and when we pulled it out we noticed it had a mechanical problem so we're getting that fixed and it just so happens that it's when we needed it the most and that's because when we got up this morning walked out to the pond I noticed we had this really dense Plankton Bloom and don't get me wrong this Plankton Bloom is what we've been trying to achieve with everything we've been doing this spring because that Plankton is the sole food source for the fish like the thread fin shad and it also makes your pond fertile and all the fish in the food chain benefit from it but there can be some negative side effects of a heavy Plankton Bloom so that's why it's important to have a sey disc and typically when we come out here and check our water visibility we're usually around that 18 to 24 in range but this morning we were measuring visibility at about 14 in and that's about the time you can start getting concerned as a pond owner so now we're going to take a few steps back and see what cause this so about 4 weeks ago I was flying the Drone around and if you have clear water in the springtime you can see all of that algae growing down there on the bottom of the pond and that filamentous algae can get out of control if you don't take care of it right right away so we treated it with a beneficial bacteria which competes with its food source and basically starves it out over a slow period of about 28 days and as all that algae is growing it's taking the nutrients out of the water and using it to grow so whenever the algae dies off it releases all of those nutrients back into the water and that's what created that Plankton Bloom that we were trying to achieve and that plankt and Bloom starts off with a nice green color and as it dies off it'll turn more Olive and look more like normal p water and that Plankton Bloom keeps the Sun from penetrating to the bottom of the pond and that prevents the algae from growing it also makes it harder for the osies to catch fish so there's plenty of benefits of the Plankton and usually only one major concern the Plankton feeds off of sunlight and on bright sunny days it produces oxygen and then at night time it consumes it so the main threat is if you ever have a couple of cloudy days in the summer time you could have what's known as a plankton crash and if it's too dense and starts dying off rapid L it can deplete all of the dissolved oxygen in the pond and create 100% fish kill and that's the exact reason why we bought the volcano pump so that even if we do get a plank in Crash we're going to pump enough dissolved oxygen back in the water to keep our fish alive but there's always other Solutions so one of the things I'm going to do is hook up some of our pumps that we're using over there in Cedar Falls we're going to get a few of those over here and basically just pumping it off the end of the dock to help out with the dissolved oxygen and the main thing is I just want to have a good plan for tonight night most of these fish kills happen whenever you deplete oxygen in the middle of the night when I'm not going to be out here to see it happening so we'll get a few of these set up just as an extra insurance policy for all these fish all right here's the results I put two pumps down in there on some blocks so it wasn't sucking directly off the bottom so right now I've got two pumps both putting out about 80 gallons per minute and that surface agitation is what we're looking for one other thing I'm going to do is turn the wh on that pumps out about 100 gallons per minute but when I went back and checked the on the volcano pump I saw it was putting out 2700 Gall per minute so I added the last pump I have so all together we got about 400 Gall per minute of surface agitation and I'm hoping that's enough so we've lost a couple of fish you can see some out there floating but so far nothing major got a couple more bluegills down here down this Bank you can also see how much better it looks and almost no algae left and this is what the algae looked like about 3 weeks ago so you can see there's some major improvements on algae control and and today's video is brought to you by the Ridge and if you're like me and have been looking for an alternative to those big bulky wallets then the ridge wallet is a perfect fit for you it's designed to hold up to 12 cards and includes a cast strap but keeps that slim profile which allows you to wear it in your front or back pockets and for an added bonus it comes with a little piece of mind and was designed with RFID blocking materials that protects you from those digital pick pocketers and they have over 30 color patterns to choose from and another really cool product is the Ridge key case which holds up to six keys and was designed to eliminate the jingle so no more rattling keychain and a few highlights of the ridge wallet is it includes a lifetime warranty as well as a 99-day risk-free trial but my favorite is that each of the ridge products have an air tag attachment to keep you from losing those valuables and if any of you are looking for that perfect Father's Day gift head over to ridge.com bamabass where they're having a Father's Day Sale where you can get up to 40% off your favorite Ridge items so a big shout out to the ridge because they kept me from having that wet leather wallet during all the rain this week so now let's check in on everybody over at Cedar Falls tiger should be fully acclimated now but one of my favorite things to do is walk around the Pond's Edge because Johnny and June have gotten accustomed to it and you'll see them use me to help Ambush their prey so all the golden shiners like to hang out in the shallow Pockets right here around the pond and whenever I walk up it pushes them out a little bit deeper and we get to see those top water [Applause] explosions hey and there's tiger right there Johnny and June over here they're in Prime feeding mode so now I'm going to walk in from the waterfall area that's where most of them are huddled up right here and as soon as they push out over those Rapids we should see some action [Applause] and now we got a school of them over there by the beach area which is going to make it a lot easier to see got him and one thing I love about it is Johnny and June are going to show tiger how to hunt and if you think about it we've basically fed him every night and he just has the shiners dropped in directly to him but now he's going to have to get out and work for him and he's got a good pair teaching him how to do it and I think we've got another permanent resident in the pond and I believe that's the same snake that we saw a couple of weeks ago here's a good close look at him I don't think he sees me but now he does pretty sure that's the same harmless water snake but now this is one that I do have a question about Liz found a shed in the pond and I've always heard if that nose area had that vshape that's one you may want to look out for but I hadn't seen many snake sheds my day so I'm not sure if you can really tell what the species is just by looking at the shed but now let's take a look at what's becoming one of my favorite parts of Cedar Falls and that's the Wetland filter it's like a Tropical Paradise up here if you missed our last video Greg the Pond Guy brought in a bunch of aquatic lies and we've got them staged up here in the Wetland filter we're going to be moving some of them down to Cedar Falls and potentially even putting some of them in the 5 acre pond because tropical lies have a one-year lifespan so after the winter comes and they die off they won't be coming back next year I love the blooms on them and they purposely sent some that bloom during the daytime hours and they also sent some that bloom at night that's why I'm thinking about putting a few more bass up here in this area they should be protected from all the Predators and have plenty of cover in those lies and we'll even have some snacks you can see we got plenty of Tad Pooles now let's check in on the Victorian Lily this one particular Lily Pad can grow lies that are 6t in diameter and strong enough to float a baby so I think we'll test that out here in a few months so we got the water crystal clear we should be able to see all the fish if they're not hiding out down there in the fish cave and there's the big male tilapia so we added two females and one male and after just watching them for a week they are very active swim around non-stop eating algae and hopefully they're going to start spawning soon and giving our bass a bunch of bait because as you can see they got big appetites man the sound of the waterfall must draw all the snakes in we've rarely seen any snakes in the 5 acre Pond the past couple years but they're everywhere at Cedar Falls we got a black racer here now let's check in on the prawns they're still growing little by little every day we drop in these protein pellets you can watch each of them as they swim up there and grab an individual pellet then sink it down to the bottom and eat it now it's time to check in on some of the wildlife we got one of the eagles flying over a cool shot with a sun in the background and if you look really closely as he's flying away I think he's either holding a bluegill or a tilapia and now it's time to show you another regular we've been seeing lately and that's an ospri and at first I was a little worried about him diving into Cedar Falls with the water being so clear but after looking back at all the footage he's never messed with a fish because you can see he's really interested in just taking a good bath and this guy will sit out here for 20 to 30 minutes at a time bathing and I think it's because the sand on the bottom if you can remember the two owls love taking a dirt bath or a dust bath I think it's the same thing with the Osprey he's using that sand to help clean off so thanks again for not snagging any of the pets but the Osprey is not the only one enjoying the sand we got the crows coming over they decided to take a bath as well so I'm happy to see all the wildlife enjoying the Pond they must have got a little spooked they started hopping around but here's a guy that's not going to take it easy on the fish and that's Mr long neck himself The Blue Heron and he's even out here doing some pregame scouting on top of the eagle Tower waiting on the sun to rise but if you notice on the bottom right of the screen one of his Mates is already hunting down there and I've noticed a lot more birds starting to use the eagle Tower you can see this one's got a little cricket and then its male companion hops up to give him a little Peck before they get the day started and he comes back for another little tasty Cricket or maybe even a worm later in the day but this particular bird I'm not 100% sure last week we had the redwinged Blackbird stop by and noticed some males up here doing their mating ritual this could be a female not quite sure about that and we saw a unique woodpecker with a white chest black wings and red head hanging out around the oak trees all right now it's time to set up some underwater cameras in the 5 acre Pond and aquaview sent me this new product I'm not even 100% sure that it's out on the market but the cool thing is is you plug the camera into a transmitter that'll be sitting out there on the dock and then it sends the signal back to the cabin where you can either record it and store it on a device like that but the overall goal is to get a live stream set up so we're going to get this installed first and then talk about our live stream so the intention was to install these cameras in the 5 acre Pond over there at the dock but since the water visibility is so low right now we're going to put them in Cedar Falls and check in on some of these fish all right we got some Shiner Swimming by you can see tiger swimming up in the background sampling out the lily pad and keep in mind he's seeing a lot of things for the very first time this week there we got our little school of bass and the baby turtle swimming in so Cedar Falls is abundant with new babies and hatchlings this year but it truly is amazing at what you can see and learn and just a short amount of time with these underwater cameras and my ultimate goal is to set up a live stream and stream every one of these Farm cameras so the eagle tower cam the Squirrel House the underwater cameras in both Cedar Falls and the Crimson Oak as well as the deer cams in the winter so here's my issue that some of you may be able to help out with right now we have starlink and I don't think it's got enough upload bandwidth to host all of these streams but I know they make devices that allow you to combine multiple sources that'll increase that bandwidth and provide a good Stream So if any of you out there have used something similar to this leave a comment or some suggestions down below but the one thing I do want you ought to be able to do is toggle between the streams so I don't want to create a unique stream for each camera but rather one stream where you can see everything at the same time so if you have any insight please share it with me and I'll do my best to get all these cameras set up so we can all watch at 24/7 and again something unique that I've seen all the fish do is they swim up to the bottom of the lily pads and poke it I don't know if it's little oxygen bubbles trapped under them or maybe even bugs they're eating but it's just funny to see that all the fish have been doing it so now I move the camera around to the other side to get a different angle we got June here in front of us and I've noticed that this particular Turtle lives in this patch of Lies so he's either going to be up there at the surface poking his head out between the lies or he also swims down and hides at the base in between all the stems and there's another good shot of the tilapia clinging off the algae for us and by the way that reminds me I asked you all what you thought we should name the three tilapia because we had one male and two females and Ron said Charlie and his two angels I kind of like that so I think that has a good ring to it so congratulations Ron you are the winner so now it's time for another Bloom update we got the underwater diffusers going the pump sitting over there on the dock and the whale going so the next thing to do is a dissolve oxygen test all right so we're going to test out the dissolved oxygen and I want to do it in a couple different places around the pond so I wanted to kind of get as far away from the well and the aration that I've got going on take one right here in the deep end one in the shallow end over there and then one right there where we're ating the water so you get a sample and try to agitate the water as little as possible and then the next thing is we're going to break off the tip and let that pond water mix in with the chemicals and you want to flip it over a few times so that air bubble mixes everything up and then compare it with these other shades of blue and the darker the shade of blue the more parts per million and it's hard to tell by the shade of blue but I'm thinking it's somewhere between 8 and 12 parts per million which should keep all the fish alive so we did another sample over in Bonnie's byou very similar results and then one last sample right over here by the whale and that came out to be about the same so looking at the three of them I don't see any major differences in the shade of blue but it is daytime and that's when your oxygen levels are going to be at the High and you guys know me I had to come out here and check on all the fishies after dark so far I don't see any issues no fish swimming up to the surface and trying to get some air that's a positive sign the deer wondered why I got the spotlight out so I came over to Cedar Falls while I was out the one interesting thing about the golden shiners is they don't hide at nighttime they spread out and move all across the pond and I have a feeling that's why a lot of fish feed at night most of the bait may stay schooled up in the daytime but at night it's a lot easier for the bass to pick them off and I wish I had a hammock set up over here by the waterfall because there's one thing for sure that soothing sound will put you right to sleep out here at night and we even have some spiders over here using the waterfall lights to trap dinner all right so we're back out here the next morning and I could be wrong about this but I think that brown paint look on the surface is some of that plankt and Bloom that died off last night luckily no major issues we did have a couple Blu gills that didn't make it and on a positive not note we got the wh water pumping in and are only about an inch away from the water going over the spill pipe and most of your Plankton Bloom always stays at the surface of the pond so we should be able to wash some of that bloom down the drain and here's an update from the next day the water's been flowing down into the pipe for about a day now and everything's looking much better most of the algae's gone the water Clarity is starting to look a little better and my fingers are crossed but I think we got through the worst of it so now let's go check in on the squirrel house and my goal this week was to put some hard nuts out here that the raccoons and mice may not take away so when the squirrel showed up something would lure him in but if you missed our last video the main inhabitant of the squirrel house is the mouse we call Gus Gus and Gus Gus is taken a l into the house he even sleeps in the bed now and oh you see Gus Gus was woken up something startled him he's checking it out to see if it's a predator the squirrel is really interested in the house but I'm not sure if he can sense that the mouse is in there or maybe even smell him but he's made a few attempts to stop by in the daytime and as you can see the food is already gone so we don't quite have enough to lure him in so now let's try to find out who ate all the almonds the first potential candidate is one of the Bandit raccoons but I can see the disappointment whenever he sniffs the almonds and begins to discard them and you can see he even tries his best to bite into one oh that's funny sheer disappointment in the food source that we put out tonight all right so if it it wasn't the raccoon That Ate Everything let's see who else it could have been and so Nate specifically built the doors on the Squirrel House small so that the raccoons and possums didn't get in the one thing I've learned about nature is they're going to find a way hopefully I don't end up coming out here one morning with a raccoon stuck in the squirrel house but I think we may have found the Almond Thief it's Mr Gus Gus himself check him out acting like a packrat and trying to stuff multiple almonds in his mouth oh and he even got too greedy and ended up dropping one but he basically came back throughout the night until everyone was gone here's something else really cool Gus Gus is bringing some extra bedding or padding in there for his bed I guess we didn't make it soft enough for his liking or either he's planning on building a nest one of the two but we had the squirrel come back and check it out the next morning and he's disappointed again that all the almonds were gone all right out here on Alcatraz Island today going to do a little fishing see if we can catch a big female with a 10-in worm these are notorious for catching the bigger bass in the pond so let's catch a few see how big they've gotten got it little guy probably a gen two bass but he's been caught 5777 he weighs pound and a half and this fish is named Willow and is a second generation B fast but I love how aggressive Willow is we've already caught it three times in the past couple months talking about eating it right at the bank this one's been caught 57 0134 2.20 lb and this fish is woolly booger putting on some pretty good weight gains oh right at the bank again man look at that red tail like they're spawning these bass confuse me every day all right she's been caught 57 0371 and this fish is named The Reaper and it's been over a year since we caught him there we go believe that's the biggest one of the day got off right at the bank but I still got him wow never been caught all right this fish is going to be 233 963 and it weighs 2.55 got it R one and see those red lips all right this fish has been caught 57601 weighs in at 1.87 lb and this is Quasimoto we caught it a couple times last year but I figured out this pattern that all the bass were relating to this new grass we got growing down on the bottom and I'm not 100% sure but each time I bring that bait through the grass that's when we're getting the bite so they're using it as an ambush point to attack those Bait fish whenever they swim over there we go got a jumper it's a nice one this fish has been caught before 69643 anyways 2 lb even but this fish is named Jaws and I'm glad I caught him again because I caught him on March 23rd a couple months ago and he was in really bad shape very skinny with a wound on his back but he's probably gained about a half a pound since in so good recovery from Jaws of all the vegetation in the pond there's one out here that we definitely don't want and that's the Cattail right here they have a really invasive root system that once they get established it is hard to get rid of them so I try to get them out of here as much as I [Music] can and I got to give a big congratulations to my baby girl Sarah for graduating kindergarten and look at that gr on Oliver he's our biggest fan all right folks that is going to wrap up this video make sure to hit that subscribe button to follow along with all these Pond builds pet bass and Wildlife out here at the farm but I hope yall enjoyed this one and we will see you all next time [Music]

Channel: BamaBass

Views: 261,757

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Id: K3I59kaGTK0

Length: 28min 50sec (1730 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 03 2024