Problem: My Pond Full of Monster Bream

[SawyerTed]

@YellowHammer sorry but I don't know the answers to those questions but I'm sure a call to the company would get the answers.  

I called my buddy's son, he's limited on what he's willing or able to share, protecting proprietary information and all that jazz. I think he wants a fee for what he knows.  Pretty crummie if you ask me.  

Another route would be to check your Extension Service pond experts or wildlife biologists who do public waters electro fishing sampling. 

[Old Greenhorn]

You know this thread reminds me of a story . Seems there was this old game warden who had been trying to nail a well known poacher for decades but could never catch him at it. When the warden retired, he briefed his young replacement on the poacher and directly the new warden started following the guy around. Hoping to finally catch him and make a name for himself he plotted the poachers tracks and learned where he went. 
So one day the warden runs the into him on the street and asks him how he's been. The poacher replied in the positive and mentioned that he was planning on doing some fishing the next morning and asked the warden if he wanted to come along. Well the season didn't open for a week yet and the warden reminded him of that. But the fella thought he might give it a try anyway. So the warden met him at the boat ramp the next day and they rowed out into the pond. The poacher reached behind his seat and grabbed a stick of dynamite, lit it and threw it over the side. After the water came back down he began collecting fish by the arm load. The warden was going nuts and listing all the violations and tickets was was gonna write and how the fella would be in jail as soon as they rowed back in and he kept going on and on and getting really worked up. Finally the old poacher grabs another stick, lights it and tossed it at the wardens feet and said: " Are you gonna fish or talk all day?"

[Resonator]

That's an OLD joke.

I like the fishing PrOject idea, could even call it the: "Sensational Invitational Alabama'r YellowHammer Fisheree Jubilee!"

Maybe even ask that nice girl with the wheel loader to splash the water and make some waves... just like the rolling tide. 

[Southside]

It's not as much of a joke as you might realize.  A small town police chief did exactly that and lost his thumb in the process, I know the details as I was the one who had to take the pictures.  

[YellowHammer]

He was fishing with dynamite? 

[Jeff]

M50s will empty a hole of Redhorse Suckers.   Bil Pete dropped a big chunk of flat limestone one time off the little Dam on Drummond Island, into a pool of suckers hoping to get one. The stone hit flat, and I guess the concusion caused 6 of them to float up.

[Southside]

He was fishing with dynamite?

Yup. 

[Andries]

He was fishing with dynamite?

Yup. 

aka: the CIL 'Red Devil'.

[YellowHammer]

Getting injured with something as mild mannered and predictable as dynamite is pretty stupid, but I guess fishing can be dangerous for the wrong people.  He only lost his thumb?  If he'd used a bigger charge, he may have been more careful with his fuse timing, but at least he survived. 

[Southside]

That was back in the late '90s, his hand was pretty messed up and his thumb was missing.  End of his career.  My employer at the time still had some old dynamite lying around and would use it to take out beaver dams.  The Navy taught me a few things about explosives, but these guys missed the classes for sure.  One day an "old timer" showed me how to remove a beaver dam and I recall commenting that we were using an awful lot of explosive for the job.  My concerns were dismissed and he went to blowing the dam, and subsequently the two side by side train tankers that were re-purposed as culverts. Then there was the day I got called as the case of sticks stored in in the airplane hanger "didn't look right" -- well it was sweating and I know YH understands what that means when I say that.  Nobody wanted to report it so I addressed the issue with about 10 gallons of diesel fuel and told the Sgt that I was going to do the same with the rest of what they had on hand as it was pretty clear that this practice needed to end.  As far as I knew, that was the end of an era and the end of an error, how nobody died was a miracle. 

[Magicman]

Apparently bad stuff.  I had an uncle that lost his left hand in a blasting cap incident that became an accident.  He was a teenager at the time just being a teenager.

[YellowHammer]

Sweating dynamite is caused by the energetic migrating out of the stabilizer, rising to the surface as crystallized or liquid beads of very impact sensitive energetic.  

Blasting caps are bad news, and have long since been eliminated except in emergency situations.  Typically, all initiators these days are either some form of EBW "Exploding Bridge Wire" or otherwise verified 1 amp, 1 watt safe.  Just basic radio frequency could set off blasting caps, especially when an untrained operator would be setting up for a shot and untwist the two wires eliminating the safety short, essentially making a perfect set of "rabbit ears" antenna.   

The armed services learned long ago that poorly designed or unstable energetics is counter productive because a tremendous amount are fired during training, and we got to keep our guys safe. 

You might be interested to know that in the 32 years I was a Level 3 explosives handler, we never got hazard pay, simply because we were so well trained to design, build and use energetics that is was a routine and daily operation, so wasn't considered hazardous if done by the book, and since we wrote the book, we shouldn't have any issues.   

[SawyerTed]

I believe it was in Reader's Digest (All In a Day's Work) years ago that I read about a fellow who went into the stump removal business.  Starting from scratch he started with a mixture of new and used equipment including a brand new pickup truck.  

He mainly used heavy equipment but occasionally had to use dynamite for removing stumps.

Being relatively new and cautious, he tried to use the minimum dynamite necessary to do the job.   On one of his first jobs he had an especially difficult stump removal job for a crusty old farmer.   The dynamite was set in place, fuse carefully measured and lit.  

At the point of explosion, the stump came out of the ground, flew through the air right into the bed of the workman's pickup truck smashing it to the ground.

The old farmer said, "That's a pretty good trick but you really should practice with an old truck!"

[Old Greenhorn]

Now THAT'S funny right there!

[B.C.C. Lapp]

I went down to Sugar Creek for a few hours early this morning. Did pretty good . 

[Otis1]

What about using fyke nets/ hoop nets? Basically a runner net from shore to the hoop nets, fish hit the runner and swim into the bigger hoop nets. you can release any bass. Sorry not as fun as dynamite.

[Nebraska]

Phone generator and some  imagination.  It will work.  Then a customer appreciation fish fry.  

[Jeff]

If it wasn't clear on the opposite side of the country, we'd have a fishfry instead of a pigroast. 

[YellowHammer]

I thought you'd get a kick out of this video short, I did a couple days ago over the weekend. The kids were out looking at the pond, the fish feeder was clogged so I was fixing it and got it throwing a bunch of feed out and Chip went swimming with the fish hitting all around him.  

https://youtube.com/shorts/kBDbU7YpFkY?feature=shared

I've been fishing it pretty much every other day, and am about to get tired of it, because I could be fishing for monster bass at Guntersville, or big small mouth at Tims Ford, but I'm at the pond thinning bream and catching 9" bass.

I'm about to break out the cast net and go nuclear on them.  As far as I can tell, I am making a dent on the big bream, beause I have seen the average size of the ones I'm catching go from all "Stupid Huge" to just an occasional smaller "Wow That's Too Big".

From what I can understand, any pond will have a maximum biomass carrying capacity of fish it can support, and it will hold X amount of lbs of fish, so for every mega bream I remove, it will be replaced with the same amount of smaller bream fry the bass can eat.  So the next bream spawn will be the full moon in May, and that's coming quick.  I'm gonna get some poundage out Yellowhammer style.       

[WV Sawmiller]

Sweating dynamite is caused by the energetic migrating out of the stabilizer, rising to the surface as crystallized or liquid beads of very impact sensitive energetic. 

Blasting caps are bad news, and have long since been eliminated except in emergency situations.  Typically, all initiators these days are either some form of EBW "Exploding Bridge Wire" or otherwise verified 1 amp, 1 watt safe.  Just basic radio frequency could set off blasting caps, especially when an untrained operator would be setting up for a shot and untwist the two wires eliminating the safety short, essentially making a perfect set of "rabbit ears" antenna. 

The armed services learned long ago that poorly designed or unstable energetics is counter productive because a tremendous amount are fired during training, and we got to keep our guys safe.

You might be interested to know that in the 32 years I was a Level 3 explosives handler, we never got hazard pay, simply because we were so well trained to design, build and use energetics that is was a routine and daily operation, so wasn't considered hazardous if done by the book, and since we wrote the book, we shouldn't have any issues. 

Robert,

    I found this out the hard way when I was in the USMC and ran the Ammo point at the Logistics base in Albany Ga. HQ sent me a notice to store several types of explosives for use by a dog handler. He'd leave his "articles" in with the explosives to get the smell on him then go play hide a seek with Phideaux.  I had only stored small arms ammo and some CS grenades so first had to develop and get approval for storage of small amounts of incompatible explosives. I did that and one of the items was commercial dynamite from a local hardware store. Since the owner's BIL worked on the base he just had him drop it off at the counter in my warehouse which scared my old manager there. We resolved that but since the dog handler was many months out and neither I or my ammo tech knew anything about dynamite I sagely told her to leave it alone. Wrong answer!

    Six months later when the handler and pooch arrived and he checked his training aids he discovered the dynamite resting in a pile of dry crystals where it had weeped out and dried. Per protocol I called EOD at Ft. Benning. Since they are Army and I was USMC they put me on hold and never came back on the line nor would they answer follow-up calls so I called the USAF in Warner Robbins who immediately dispatched 2 long blue AF pickups and we "Carefully" transported the explosive to the base landfill and burned it.

  FWIW our ammo bunker was 110' from the base brig and 205' from the base childcare facility. Yes, I know - who co-locates brigs and childcare facilities but USMC kids are brought up to be tough.