Harvesting the Fish Pond

By Anthony:

I always am able to catch tilapia, but I was worried that there were too many catfish in my pond eating most of the small tilapia which thankfully reproduce regularly. The catfish weren't reproducing so I knew there were about 28 left (I started with 33, and with 200 tilapia). All other methods including hooks and traps to catch the catfish were not working. Some of them were getting huge. So I recruited a bunch of friends to help me use a wide net, moving with it across the whole pond.

To start though, we first had to remove all of the pond plants (we put them back in when we were done). We also pumped out a lot of water to the plants around the yard to make the pond less deep so that we could stand up without the water going up to our heads.

The first day we used our own net, and it completely failed. We fished with it from 8am to 1pm and only caught tilapia. We didn't catch a single catfish. I gave everyone some tilapia to take home but it was really disappointing. There were a lot of exclamations about Jesus' disciples saying "we fished the whole night and caught nothing!"

I planned another day to try again. We fixed all the holes the catfish had punched in our net. We made it like 5 nets thick. We did major renovations on the net to try to make it much less likely for catfish to sneak around the sides of it, or under the bottom of the net. We used a hosepipe filled with sand along the bottom of the net to weigh it down. We were really optimistic and did a lot of work! Only to find out it still completely failed to catch any catfish.

That same day, we had to call our guard's friend, who has a really good large net, with a long pouch in it. We rented it for the rest of the day. The fish look at the opening in the middle of the net (the pouch), and think it's a way to escape, so they go into it, only to find it has a dead end. Then they are stuck.

We seriously muddied up the yard and even killed small tilapia in the mud. We also accidentally netted huge logs that I had in the water. That made the net really heavy when it had a 3 foot log in it!

However, we were much more successful this time! We managed to get 10 catfish. Catfish have to be some of the sneakiest and smartest fish. Because we dragged this net so many times trying to leave no space for them to escape, using all of our efforts, and still most of them never got caught.

Here is the biggest catfish we got. It was very strong.

We threw back in the small tilapia, but kept about 15 or so. We all got dirty. I took the longest shower I've had in the last few years. It was a fun and interesting experience to do with friends here and we will remember it! It's been a few months already that have passed by the time of this post and the tilapia have multiplied greatly with thousands of fingerlings.