I always hear of people stocking their ponds and lakes with channel cat. Does anyone ever stock blues? If so, are there any challenges?

I prefer Bluecats, they get bigger and I think they taste better. They usually don't muddy the water the way that channels sometimes do. Blues can get very large and they are excellent predators, in fact I've often caught them on spoons and spinnerbaits, so if you are trying to have a trophy bass lake blues may compete with your bass in some areas.
Bluecat also take about 4 years to reach sexual maturity so you won't have any reproduction for the first few years but in a small pond this can be good.
Best of Luck

My problem with them is their potential size. A 10 pound fish of any kind can clean out most of the competition.

Like channel cats, they can become conditioned and hard to control or eliminate.

I agree w/Dave. I'd be very careful about stocking blues, especially any large number of them per acre.

Just depends on your objectives...but if you are interested also in bass fishing, I definitely would not stock blues.

The lake is about 800 acres in size and we stock bass, catfish, and coppernose blue gill every year. I think we have always put in channel cat that is why I was asking about blues. I want to question the powers that be on our lake about putting in some blues and not just channel cats every year. Thanks for yalls input.

thats a big private lake. I think blues should do fine in a lake that size, but its JMO

Will channels and/or blues spawn in a small pond; 5-10 acres?

Generally not....unless you provide spawing cavities for them... something which mimicks a hollowed out log or horizontal cavity can work.

Blues are more picky than channels so providing barrels or something of that effect will definitely help but I've seen channels spawn in 1 acre ponds with no artificial structures whatsoever. All animals have one major goal in life and that is to further their species, so not much can stop them.
I hear time and time again that channel cat won't spawn unless there is running water and it's simply not true.

They will certainly spawn. However, the fry have very little chance of escaping predation.

along time ago we had our pond at our deer lease stocked by the tpwd they did it for free. we had them come out and test the waters for many things like depth,ph,nitrates and nitrites they came back about 2 months later and stocked it. they gave us a list like what types of fish we could choose from, the game warden told us stuff like we can have this type of fish and this type together but not these together. i dont know if they still do this but im sure they do.

No longer.

old tires