Fish Feeding Bay

Fish in a pond are hard to get at. A feeding bay is a shallow shelf cut into one edge of the basin, where feed goes down at the same place and the same time every day until the stock learns to come to it. The fish can then be lifted out with a dip net whenever some are wanted, instead of draining or seining the whole pond. The bay is cut during the pond's original excavation - it cannot be added to a basin that already holds water - and has no existence apart from the pond it belongs to.

Two ideas work at once. The first is conditioning, sometimes called the four fixes: fixed feed, fixed amount, fixed time, fixed place. The fixed place is also what makes the amount eaten visible. The second is drainage. If the bay is cut beside the pond's outlet gate and the basin floor is graded to fall toward it, the depression that gathers the fish at feeding time also gathers them when the water is let down for a full harvest. A basin of that kind is usually about 1 to 1.5 percent of the pond's water surface, or nearer 2 percent where young fish are handled.

Overfeeding is what goes wrong. Uneaten feed and waste are broken down by bacteria that use a lot of oxygen, and the bay is the shallowest, warmest water in the pond and the first to run short at night - which is how a feeding point becomes a fish kill. The test is simple: if the fish have not cleared the feed in five to ten minutes, the next ration is cut. Feeding is warm-season work, roughly from when the water climbs past 18 C (65 F) until it falls back, and a bay baited in cold water only collects spoiling feed. Cut it on the upwind bank so feed drifts out across the water rather than washing ashore, and do not let the fish settle there overnight; deeper water elsewhere is what carries them through a low-oxygen night. A permanently baited spot also collects disease, so it is disinfected on a cycle.