Events: Trying to catch Koi:
Team helping out with our Koi endeavor.
Over the years we have tried many times to catch Koi in our Koi pond.
This is our main koi pond
What we've accomplished so far when it comes to catching Koi.
2008 - Dragging the pond:
We put together a net 30' x 150'. All secured with floats / sinker ropes / ground lines/ we ended up even putting rollers to go over the rough bottom!
We spent a few days "with no success" dragging this huge net around that pond to try and catch some koi. We ended up catching only one "1" 22' Koi...
Over the period of a few days of mending / fixing the net due to large tares from large rocks, roots and bottom hard pan, we only managed to catch one "nice koi". We had no idea on how agile these fish were, although note; it was an eye openning event to see all those koi jumping over out net like there was nothing there.
I now wish that I had filmed all of this as it was unbelieveable to see all these fish jumping 2 or 3 feet over the net like there was nothing there.
June 22nd 2011: We build a Koi trap. "Many years ago we had a bit of success with minnow traps to catch small Koi so we thought that if we built a bigger trap it would catch larger Koi.
Here is the trap we built.
The building of this trap was "for the most part" a waste of time as we might have caught a dozed or so small fish from pulling that trap out of the water for a couple of weeks. NO GREAT SUCCESS.
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19th June 2011: HIred a professional.
We hired a professional to try to catch some of our koi for us as we were clearly unable to.
On this day we tried with an electrofisher which we were told was definately going to work. See images below..
Electrofisher- with no success.
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We also tried with dip nets - No success.
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Boats and dip nets - No success
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We tried with a large dragging net. -
No success.
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Some of the crew giving up due to no success. "see one's resort to a fly fishing rod!"
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Image of our last attempt. UPDATE - "So far no success"
Note: This last attempt was a waste of time also..... :-(
We were told that this net which we bought would sink! Sink it did not, it floated... Starting to get frustrated.
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Physically dragging our pond is next to impossible due to the fact that we left piles of big rocks laying on the bottom "in addition to hard pan roots etc." of this pond when we created it, we thought that it would help build a sanctuary for our fish if we left obstacles down there for thier protection, little did we know that it would be their protection from us!
It is quickly becoming apparent that we most likely will have to drain the pond to catch some fish, but the problem with draining this pond is that it has approximately 1.8 million gallons of water in it, and to refill it, our most likely source is that, we would have to tap into the lake on the other side of our house and we are not willing to do that in order to prevent cross contamination of the 2 water sources! The lake we live on currently has pickeral, bass, white perch etc...
We have known, for some time that this "pumping out the pond" was most likely the only way for us to catch our koi fish in this pond, but we opted to try alternate means. Not much success so far, but we have not given up yet....
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