i sometimes leave out a lot and when i look back over my post i feel i have left out quite a bit. i get in a hurry and cant type worth a flip either. anyway i cant stress enough the importance of knowing where these springs are coming from. had we not of dug the spring gravel and sand out of the core i'm sure it would have leaked badly and more than likely you wouldnt have seen any moving water behind the dam it would have been moving about 8 ft undergroung to who knows where and i would have had a mad owner of a leaking pond. so its way better to find and deal with problems at the begining even if it cost you a day or two. i mentioned we found more springs in the pond bottom and they are getting more productive all the time and i believe its because we shut the flow off at the core and its backing water up into the pond bottom. i am continually building new haul roads for the scraper due to soft spots popping up here and there. i have taken the trackhoe to these spots and all are the same with a sand gravel mix about 5 ft underground 5-10 ft wide and 3-4 ft deep. they are all coming from upstream which is good. they look as if they are coming from straight up beneath the earth until you dig them up and see just whats going on. there is 4-5 ft of very good clay on top of all this underground activity which almost fooled me on the core. if you go upstream from the pond dam 1/2 mile its about a 400 ft change in elevation. we have fixed several ponds over the years that were spring fed and leaking in this area. none showed any evidence of water moving behind the dam and the owners had came to the conclusion that that the water pressure in the pond was forcing the water to somewhere in the earth which would be true if the beginning of the spring was located in the pond bottom but in every case it was escaping under the core. evidently the contractor didnt core deep enough probably because he never seen the need to just as i almost did here. but even if i didnt get it in the beginnig once i seen these springs in the pond bottom i'd been back at the core digging deeper looking for where they traveled beneath the dam. because if they are not surfacing they are going downhill somewhere.
