Stocking My Monster Bass Pond with THOUSANDS of Fish!

Well what's up guys this is Daniel from Arms Family Homestead and today I'm in Gainesville, Texas buying bait fish for the Monster Bass Pond. You guys have seen our bass pond multiple times. Houston always loves to go there catching fish but it's fall, the water has cooled down in the pond and it's time to add some bait fish. So we'll get everything loaded up here. I'll roll some footage of that when we get home. I'll show you what all we bought, kind of why we bought it, and we're All right, made it back home. Now made it back home with all our fish. I have to admit I may have gone just a just a tad bit overboard. I got down there, I got excited, the prices were good and I bought quite a few fish. Now I'll go into a breakdown and tell you all what I bought and why and what everything but the goal, I'm not going to try to drive my truck all the way over to the pond so we're going to load everything in the Kubota Sidekick here, get them all packed in safe and sound. Now some of you are going to say, well that doesn't look like that much. Well here's the thing, that's just the shiners, that's just the bait fish because I ran out of room in the back seat of the truck. We're full of fish in here too. Everybody alive? Everybody survived the trip? Yeah, so I got a lot of fish, got a lot of fish to go get in the pond. So I'm going to get the truck backed up to the Sidekick. We're going to load everything over in here and then go release them into the Monster Bass Pond. Oh yeah, everybody fit just fine. Now that is a load of fish. Let's head to the pond. Hey, what are you doing on the seat? I thought you like to run. Are you going to be lazy today? Huh? You better have a seat belt on. So if you're new to the channel, this is our Bass Pond. It's been on our property, I think my dad built this pond about, I would say 25 years ago or so. It's mostly just an old valley that he dammed up over here and flooded all the timber. So back in that part of the pond, it's fairly shallow four or five feet deep. Left all the standing timber out front by the dam. We're talking 10 to 15 feet deep at most, but made it over here. Got all the fish ready to go in the pond. Now before we can't just cut the bags open and dump them all in, we need to acclimate these guys. They've been riding in the back of the truck for an hour and a half or so. The guys at the Pond King use these aerated bags. They fill them up with oxygen, so they should last a couple hours before the fish start to die off. We're losing a few shiners, but not enough to really worry about. So I'm going to take these bags and just start setting them in the edge of the water and letting the temperature kind of acclimate. So when we release them, they're a little bit more acclimated to the new pond. All right, so I'm going to need a favor before we get too far into this. Please, let's not utter a word to this to Houston. He's going to be so upset for me, or so upset with me, for going and buying all these fish without him. Because we know Houston loves the fish. He loves to keep fish in his little pond on the porch, which we haven't updated you guys on in a while. He loves trapping fish. He loves everything about fish. We know he loves eating fish, and I know he would sure be disappointed in me for doing this without him. But he's in school today, and it just is what it is. So this is not a sponsored video. The guys at Pond King did not ask us to make this video. They didn't give me the fish for free. I paid full price for them. But while I've been sitting here kind of acclimating myself, or acclimating myself, while I'm catching my breath, while I've been sitting here catching my breath and the fish are acclimating to the water, I pulled out my phone and just was kind of searching some stuff on Pond King. And they actually have a YouTube channel, and they make some really stinking cool pond pontoon boats. Like one-man, two-man pontoon boats. They don't have a lot of content on their YouTube channel, but there's a few videos out there. I'll link to their channel. They've also got a website. I'm scrolling through going, I need that. I need that. I need that. So maybe Pond King, if you're watching this, we should work together in the future. And anyways, guys, if you're watching, go check out Pond King. Go check out their website. They've got some really cool small pontoon boats, fish feeders, all kinds of cool stuff. And I may have to hit them up for some more pond supplies for our big bass pond. If we could just get Bear here to pull his weight and make a little more money around here, we could buy us one of those little pontoons. Yeah, maybe someday, Bear. Maybe someday. So the big question is going to be, what did I buy and why? So I'll give you a little breakdown. I'll show you the fish as we start releasing them. First, I bought 100, four and a half to five inch copper nose bluegill. They're pretty good size bluegill. They're big enough that we could already catch them on a small hook if the kids went over here and catch a few. But I wanted to get big bluegill, as big as I could get. That's the biggest size they offered at Pond King at the time. That way my bass that are in the pond already don't just eat them all when they're gone. We spend a lot of time this summer trapping bluegill and turning them loose, but when you're releasing five to ten or fifteen at a time, the bass are probably going to eat most of them. So hopefully we bought some big enough bluegill that most of them will survive and they can spawn in the spring. The second thing I bought, and they don't have a good reason other than just because I wanted to, was 50 six to eight inch long channel catfish. And we used to have catfish in this pond years ago. I've got actually a really special catfish. The lighting is terrible. Let's turn this way. I actually got one really special albino catfish, and I know Houston's especially going to be mad at me because I'm fixing to just release it in the pond. But we bought those channel catfish, bought 50 of those, just so we could start raising a few catfish to come over here and let the kids catfish. And then the third fish that I bought was shiners. And I bought, this is where I went overboard. The bluegill were not bad. Four and a half to five inch bluegill were a dollar a piece. The six to eight inch channel catfish were 70 cents a piece. So I didn't really spend a whole lot on those. The shiners, this is a bass pond. Our goal is to grow giant bass and bring our kids over here and let them catch two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight pound bass. So I bought 20 pounds of shiners. And they're, shiners are minnows. They're bait fish about three to four inches long. I could have got fathead minnows, which were one to two inches long, but I wanted something big that would really put some weight on the bass in this pond going into fall. So 20 pounds of shiners should be plenty of baitfish for a long time to keep the bass from trying to eat our bluegill that we just bought. At least that's my theory. I could be wrong. All right. So our fish have been acclimating here for, I don't know, 10, 15 minutes. I'm going to try to release a few. It's going to be hard to see it on camera, but I'll try to release a few so you guys can see. All right, little guys, good luck to you. Best wishes. There they go. I don't know if you can see them on camera, but stepped off a rock. Got water in my boot. All right. Got all the shiners released. Now I'm going to start on the bluegill and catfish, but I'm going to open up a bag of bluegill and kind of show you what we're working with first. I can hear bass swirling all over the place already, eating shiners. So here's a couple of the bluegill that we bought. I don't want to dump my bag out. So that's about it. All right. We'll just hold one. So this is about the average size bluegill and these are called copper nose bluegill. Maybe I can lip him and show him to you. So that's what we're after. I bought a hundred of these guys, like I said, and we want them to go out and get fat this winter and spawn and just have thousands of these to feed the bass next spring. You're free. That's how Houston releases them. He just chunks them. I'm going to go ahead. I don't know that it's really necessary. I don't know that's really necessary, but I'm going to go ahead and kind of release them in this grass. It's about two feet deep in water right here, but releasing them in this grass, it'll give them time to learn their surroundings and not just dart off out into the deep water and get swallowed by three pound bass. And last but not least, all the channel catfish. Look at these guys. They're so cute. Look at them. Now, like I said, we did get one albino. Let me see if I can fish him out of there real quick. All right, here he is. Oh, he's got me. Little stinker has got some spines that hurt. There we go. Look at that. An albino catfish in our bass pond. Now, I don't know how long he'll survive. Being albino, he may be an easy target for a predator. I should probably, if I was a nice guy, save this for Houston. But anyways, as I was saying, I figure it's probably better off just that we released it into the pond, but he's kind of cool. Kind of a neat little fish right there. All right, little buddy, you go and grow big. We hope to see you in a couple years when you're like three, four, five, ten pounds, maybe. You go be a big guy. Don't get eaten, please. Good job. You go hide in the grass. That's a great idea. Oh, there goes a half-eaten bait fish of some sort. Look at that. I caught a little bluegill. Actually, that's probably a green sunfish. Still alive. I think he's only got one eye, though. He's alive. That might be a bluegill, but I think that's going to be a green sunfish. Good luck, buddy. It's going to be a rough world out there with one eye. All right. Don't fall in. Down to the last bag. We're going to release this last bag of channel catfish, which is actually double bags. So, let's get that first one out of the way. Here we go, guys. Have a good life. Get big. Do me proud. Houston likes to eat catfish, so watch out for him. And that right there is why I say an albino catfish is going to have a hard time surviving. So, if you guys can't tell, I'm really excited to be adding all these new fish to the pond. It's going to create so many more fishing opportunities for my kids and myself over the next few years. I love managing this pond. Ideally, eventually, I'd love to have a big dock over here. We'd come over here and fish, camp out on the dock at night, and releasing catfish in here means we'll be able to catfish at night and, I don't know, just lots of fun stuff. Lots of great family adventures here in our, I call it the monster bass pond, because there's some giant bass in here. So much fun to catch. So, they should be well fed through the wintertime. I hope. I mean, I don't think they'll eat 20 pounds of shiners in just a few days, but, heck, you never know. So, anyways, go check out Pond King. Like I said, this is not a sponsored video. They didn't, they have no idea I'm even making this video, but I'll leave a link to their YouTube channel up here and a link to their website in the description box down below. They make a lot of cool stuff, and if you're in north Texas, southern Oklahoma, and you're looking for fish to add to a pond, they have an amazing selection and really great prices. So, anyways, guys, that's all I've got for today. Thanks for watching. Hope you enjoyed it. Y'all have a great day, and as always, we'll see you on the next video.