We have a bass pond that we built a few years ago. When it's full it's about 7 acres. We stocked it well (half Northern and half Florida), and have had some good bass in just a few short years. We regularly stock bluegill and add shiners for forage.
It was supposed to be about 12-14ft deep at the deepest point. The person who built it didn't even come close to accomplishing that. When it's full, the deepest part may be 8ft. Half the pond is probably 4-6ft and the rest is 2-3ft.
Besides not being dug deep enough, it doesn't have a good watershed and struggles to get enough runoff to stay full. When the water evaporates in the summer, we are down to about 4 acres and an average depth of 1-4ft. The water stays pretty clear, and the grass grows easily. This leads to the entire bottom being covered in a algae sort of grass. I'm not even sure I'd call it algae. It's not always slimy, sometimes more of a dry, stringy, moss sort of grass. You cannot fish any bottom-contact baits at all.
We've push some aqua shade type stuff in, but that didn't really help.
The pond gets low in the summer and stays that way until the spring. In the early spring (right now), we burn off all of the grass around the edges that grew when the water was down the previous summer. We were hoping it could prevent that grass from decaying and causing more of an algae problem.
It's on a farm, so the runoff it does get is likely to contain fertilizers and stuff of that nature that probably contribute to the algae/grass growth.
Anyone have any tips for trying to manage the bottom growth?