[PhishingPhreek]

Last Saturday Sparkchaser and I went out to the Mesa Game and Fish office to help out with the tear down of the new habitats that were poured the day before. I can't speak for both of us, but I had a lot of fun doing it and want to help out with more events like this. There were quite a few volunteers out there so the job was finished a lot faster than expected.

I spoke with Amberle, who's spearheading this whole thing, about the destination of all these new habitats and she informed me that they plan on setting them in Rosey sometime next summer.

Here see a few photos of the habitats and what it looked like as we took them apart.

[FishMan]

Way to go guys and thank you for representing us so well.

[Fishless]

Great job guys, I am just not convinced that those habitat balls are the answer? they are costly and so labor intensive heavy to transport and deploy etc.  I still think plastic habitat is the way to go and much easier to assemble etc. I foresee those reef balls covered with silt with in a few years

[PhishingPhreek]

Great job guys, I am just not convinced that those habitat balls are the answer? they are costly and so labor intensive heavy to transport and deploy etc.  I still think plastic habitat is the way to go and much easier to assemble etc. I foresee those reef balls covered with silt with in a few years

That's an interesting thought that never crossed my mind. They're very sturdy and offer a great rock-like habitat, but they're very heavy and could sink through time if not put in a good, solid place. If they don't sink or get covered by the silt they'll last a lot longer than the plastic habitats.

I don't think there is such thing as the "right answer" for man-made habitats. Plastic and PVC offer a great flexible structure that the fish probably prefer, but it will breakdown and wear over time. These concrete ones are solid and will stay together for years, but they not the preferred structure for fish.

Amberle was talking about some different habitat concepts they were looking into for future plans. They're called Georgia Cubes or Kansas Cubes and consist of PVC and corrugated pipe. Very cheap to buy and extremely easy to assemble and last around 10 years. I don't see a 10 year lifespan on these to be that long, but because of the ease to build and cost, it's a decent ROI.

Here's a video and some pictures of what they look like.

[PhishingPhreek]

This is another video I found on the habitats that I thought was pretty good.

[Fishless]

Louis, I have duck hunted roosevelt for years and I can attest to areas of that lake being a mud pit when you step out of a boat in shallow water what looks like nice firm ground gives way to a mud bog if those cement reef balls get set in the wrong place they will sink plus with big runoff years a lot of heavy silt hits that lake.

I have seen even this last year 30yr old plastic habitat in Bartlettt that is still there and looking fine, many of the pvc boxes they put in have fallen down some because of idiots vandilizing them and some because with low water levels the pvc is exposed to our ultraviolet bombardment and fall apart but many of the old commercially purchased banana plant type tree structures are still functional when water covers them. TNF has started in recent years when they were doing the habitat build at Bartlett using that flexible black pvc pipe both for cages and on plastic stands like a tree set up and they seem to be working well so far although I think they recently stopped their habitat project at Bartlett and what I have seen of recent installs it was more baskets than tree type structures that crappie like? Just thinking of cost and ease of assembly they are using an incredible amount of plastic structure at Lake Havasu with great success?