Claude, You are absolutely right in your deductions.
Bill is really off-base in his rather Demanding tone that
fish will be okay in an iced over pond - and for us
to Relax. Who in hell does he think he is?
I have only been
ponding since 1994 so I don't know everything. But one year we had a
prolonged period of horribly cold
weather. I lost several to many goldfish... about 3 inches long. The bottom
of my pond was not all that clean either. I learned from
books and articles (before I stumbled on this group)
on the situation. All advice was to keep a hole open
in the pond - the advice was to use a pan of boiling
water to get a hole open in the pond and to maintain it.
I bought a De-Icer from a farm equipment
place - and cleaned the bottom of the pond. Then I found out about CSA/BZT
powder. Kept up the maintenance doses. No more losses.

You can draw your own conclusions.

Nedra in Missouri
http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Pines/4836
http://community.webshots.com/user/nedra118

"Claude" wrote in message
...
I love the theory Bill, but wouldn't a big pond be a lot less affected by
gases than our "making an assumption here" smaller, say 500 to 2000 gallon
ponds. I would love to think your right, and I'm not saying your not,
just
going by what pretty much "assumption again" everyone here has said post
after post. I guess the question here would be has anyone ever lost any
fishies do to the pond freezing over, not solid, just frozen top layer so
no
gases could escape........I am a rookie here at best, only a year or so's
experience, not arguing here, if there's no need, cool sign me up. Just
don't want my fishies mad at me......Claude