Dear dudemanspecial,
I can only tell you about two bluegill ponds that consistently produced out-sized bluegills.
The first one was owned by a woman that was a teacher with my father. It was on a small farmette in central Bucks County when the area was still predominantly rural. I fished it as a kid with my brothers, but even then, I noticed that pond was probably built as way to drain the property so there would be tillable land. The inlet area was very marshy, and we would get our arses cracked by Dad if we went too far into it. Likewise, the outlet was similarly marshy. One thing that pond had in abundance was snapping turtles, no doubt because of the marshy terrain where they could lay eggs. It was a rare day at the pond when a fish on the line didn't get grabbed by a snapper before we could hoist it out. I think the turtles did the job of keeping the pond in balance and allowed both the sunfish and bass to grow to good sizes.
The second pond is on the property of a friend of a friend in Lycoming County. While I haven't been there in years, I can tell you that the pond was built in a natural draw on the hillsides of the property. He decided to build a pond and built a sump in a small cold-water creek to supply the pond's water. It literally took years for the pond to fill naturally from that sump, but it did. The source was just a little rill that continued alongside the border of one side of the pond as if no water was being taken out. That pond had clean clear cold water all the time. It was about 15 feet deep and didn't have many weeds. He bought like 50 bluegills and just stocked it. And they took off like wildfire. His brother got the brilliant idea of fishing the night before the opening day of trout season every year and usually dropped 35 to 50 trout in it every April.
Those were the only fish in the pond, and they all grew big on the abundant tadpoles and frogs in the pond. The water wasn't really clear except at the inlet end, but in May or June you could literally see clouds of tadpoles milling around on the shoreline. Every once in a while, you'd see a cloud of silt around the tadpole clouds. you just cast something into the cloud and bam, you had a nice bluegill or an even nicer 2- or 3-year-old stocky brown that grew up.
Neither of the mentioned ponds were particularly weedy, and any weeds that existed were the weeds common to the area. There was no hydrilla, or Eurasian milfoil or any introduced crap. Just plain old pond scum which provided habitat to damsel and dragon flies.
That's the story of the two best bluegill ponds I've ever fished. I know it's a long story but I'm old so humor me and read it! 😉
Regards,
Tim Murphy 🙂
www.wired2fish.com
