Catch Up Ball and the Divorce

I haven't posted in a while. Haha - like anyone has noticed! That's okay... I write here to purge and get things straight in my own mind as much as anything else.

Well, without going into any of the gory details, I've become separated from my wife. Irreconcilable differences, I guess. I don't think either of us really wanted it deep down, but we just couldn't overcome a couple of problems.

So, I've moved back in with my folks out in Barboursville. My two oldest kids (from my first marriage) are moving with me. During the summer they stay with their Mom and visit me on the weekends. This weekend will be the first where they get to see their new digs.

I'm actually kind of excited. I think I'm realizing that, much like Papa, I'm a rolling stone. I enjoy change on some level no matter what kind of change it is. It's the same here. There's a lot of pain, of course, but most things painful also cause you to grow. "Look at the bright side whenever possible" is becoming my new motto.

One of the things in the "plus" column is the room in which my kids will be staying. It's my sister's old room and is easily the coolest room in the house. It's huge with a loft and the sweetest walk-in closet a girl could ever want under that loft. My daughter (11) will be getting the closet except for one rack so my son (14) can have some hanger space. He has a nice big dresser out in the room for his stuff.

Another thing in the "plus" column is the lake on my folks' property. It needs to be stocked, but it does have a small and very fiesty largemouth bass population. I've been fishing twice since I moved in on Saturday and these ferocious fish have given me many needed hours of peace and relaxation.

Four years ago there was a drought which just about drained our little 3/4 acre pond. The opportunity was taken to completely drain the lake and rebuild our aging dock. The pond was never restocked.

In steps Mother Nature... the pond seems to have been naturally restocked with largemouth bass. From what I've been told and what I've read this is likely to have been done by geese. We have a family of geese which visits our pond each year in their migrations. Evidently these geese will eat fish eggs if they stumble upon a nest. Some get digested and some just pass right through. They ate some eggs at another pond along their route and then pooped them out in our lake. Either that or their legs brushed some eggs which stuck and then upon landing in our lake the eggs were deposited.

Either way, natural bass stocking! Our bass are suffering from a lack of their normal food sources - usually bluegill or some other form of sunfish. Evidently these geese ate no bluegill eggs. The bass in our lake were surviving off of tadpoles for a while and now seem to have switched to surface feeding on bugs since the tadpoles matured. Tuesday night I was out at the lake at around 6:30 or so and witnessed a number of surface strikes, including an eating of a post-coital dragonfly who flew too close to the surface after his mid-air whoopie was done.

The end product are bass that simply stay hungry - surface feeding on bugs is a much more energy-intensive venture for less food in return for their effort than bass are used to. I'm telling you these bass bite at about anything. From what I've caught, there seems to be five or six bass with most of them being in the 8-10 inch range and one down at around seven inches or so. I think their diet is limiting how much they can grow.

So I've done some research on stocking the pond. For less than $150 I'll be able to get 10 more largemouth (at 5 inches), 10 catfish (at 10 inches), and 90 bluegill (at 3 inches). This should keep the proper ratio of predator to prey in the bass/bluegill equation. Some sources say the ratio should be five bluegill to each bass, some say seven to one. I split the difference and said six to one (5 native bass + 10 stocked = 15 bass times 6 = 90 bluegill). These numbers are a quarter less than the numbers the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries suggests for a warmwater pond an acre in size.

As long as I harvest bluegill at a five or six to one ratio to the bass, the poulation should be fairly self-regulating after one season. I may even look into some minnows. That bears some more research, though.