I purchased my grandfathers property a few years back years after he had passed. The current owner had let everything grow up including the ponds. I decided to renovate the larger pond and fill in the old livestock pond.

The renovation/expansion went well. We took a 1/2 pond that was 10' deep and made a 2 acre pond 26' deep at the damn and 4' deep at the intake.

I finished the project just in time for spring last year and waited on mother nature to fill er up....oh wait we had a drought last year. I have a farily large creek that runs the property line, I purchased some pumps and 5 million gallons or so later it's full!

A week or so after filling the pond I noticed a few damp spots on the dam towards the bottom. I didn't worry much, but the other hand we took an already existing dam that was wide enough for a bicylcle, added about 600 tons of dirt, made it 60 foot wide at the bottom and 30 foot wide at the top.

Over time (a few more weeks) the damp spots now have become little streams in two places at the bottom of the dam. It's hard to say how much I'm losing but my pump will run about 40,000 gallons of water before it runs out of gas. It will take about 2 weeks before I need to run it again.

So here's where I screwed up I think when building the dam. We used the existing dam and built off it, BUT...I was told that I should have keyed the old dam (which makes since duh) and that the water is seaping through the old dam and the new.

That being said, and that's a best guess btw, over the winter I could not pump water and I lost approximately 8' from November to March. We got heavy rains this spring, the pond filled and I was busy with everything else, plus the river has been out 5 times, so I didn't start pumps until last week. This time around it looks like I lost around 4 or 5 feet and the dam was moist but there was no standing water or tiny streams.

All that being said, does anyone think that it will seal up on its own? I've been giving a few options but not really liking either. One is to drain the pond and put a liner on the dam, this is an issue for the 1800 or so fish I have. The other is to dig the middle of the dam out down to the old dam and install a tile to help direct the water. I don't care for that one either considering my backhoe wouldn't be able to go deep enough and I would have to redo all of my pipes.

My thought is to pump water until (fingers crossed) it seals. the only bad part is I have a road behind the dam, I learned last fall I can not use it without at least putting tile down. Buried my side by side to the frame....

Any ideas, thoughts, suggestions from the experts out there would be much appreciated! Chad