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Generator, Hydroponics Air-Pump with big air stones. Mine has spots for 12 tubes and big stones.

yes rectangular. Thanks for info

Hi John

Welcome to the forum. I help people with Pond Construction, rehab, and leak abatement nationwide, and I’m happy to share my experiences and provide some insights moving forward. I’m a volunteer moderator here and my time is always free to fellow Pond boss members. Feel free to reach out anytime, happy to help in anyway I can.

tj@hudlandmgmt.com

It is also important to treat the pond with enough chemical to knock the clay out of suspension. Too little chemical can sometimes just be a waste of time and money.

Is your pond roughly rectangular?

Estimated volume:

90 x 3 x 45 x 3 x 4' (avg. depth) = 145,800 cu. feet of water.

145,800 cu. ft x 7.48 gallons/cu. ft = 1,091,000 gallons. [You can fiddle with the dimensions a little if you want to consider some different volume estimates.]

If you test a know volume of pond water in your jar, you can determine the minimum amount of chemical required per gallon and then add a "safety" margin just to make sure.

I am NOT a pond treatment expert. Just throwing out some more ideas for you. You might come back with some more info just before you are ready to make an expensive purchase and hopefully the actual experts can provide answers to your final questions.

Here are two links to detailed discussions about treating ponds with suspended clay. There are several possible treatments. You might read a bit to determine which treatment is optimal for your pond, and which has the best cost/benefit analysis for what is available in your area.

Alum Kicks Clay's Butt

Part 2

Once you know the exact description of what you need, you can find a supplier in your area.

Good luck on getting your pond water cleaned up. The fact that your sample cleaned up nicely is a very encouraging result.

That is even easier to fix than sand in the bottom!

If you still have silty-clay material on site, or you still have good material in the bottom of the pond, then you just need clay blankets to seal that sand layer.

For a water depth of 10' or less, two six-inch lifts of compacted clay should be sufficient.



This type of compactor can easily roll up and back down your pond side slopes. Rental in my area is only $1,500/day. (The transport fee would be around $200 each way for me.)

Cat CP44 Vibratory Soil Compactor

You might be able to do the entirety of a 1-acre pond in two days? You would also need a small-medium dozer pushing material onto the side slopes. It could perhaps be accomplished in a single day if the sand layer is only present in part of the pond slopes.

You also need to wet the clay blanket material to the correct moisture content for optimal compaction. Is there still water in the bottom of your pond basin? You can use that to spray the dozed material after each load.

I would definitely ask the geo engineer what moisture content was their target for the detention pond, and if there is an easy way for you to estimate moisture content on your project.

Finally, do you have a small tractor with a disc attachment? After sealing the sand layer, I would recommend discing the other side slopes and the bottom of the pond in a few passes with different orientations. Wet that as needed, and then roll the heck out of that while your compaction equipment is still on site. Hopefully, that will give you a pretty tightly sealed pond.

I have zero experience hauling fish.

However, I work with lots of truck drivers that haul loads of liquids right at the weight limits of their rig.

I believe it is very important to have your tanks full, to minimize the sloshing of your load. Both for the health of the fish AND for the health of the driver.

(Perhaps an actual fish hauler in the forum can address "best practices" in that regard.)

Pond is 90 yards long and 45 yards wide and deepest is 7-8 foot

here is a picture of some of pond

I think I figured it out. Maybe you can see the sketch now.

Where do you find alum for treating ponds with? I live in northeast Oklahoma and have a pond that is in clay ground and has never cleared up. I put a teaspoon of alum in a gallon of water and it cleared over night!
Thanks! I will try and post some pics

Thanks for the welcome and for the advice. I wasn't very clear in my description. The bottom holds water but about a foot up there's a sand layer that prevents the runoff from filling the pond. I'd attach a sketch of a cross section but cant figure out how to do that.
Anyhow, since the original post I found a local geotechnical engineer who had spec'd clay for a detention pond at Camp Lejeune. Spec was for permeability no greater than 0.00003 ft/s. The material supplier is right near by & the lady tells me they're still mining that pit. I expect to get pricing for enough to line the whole bottom come Monday when I talk to the boss man.
Thanks again.

That may help the minnows. But depending on the size of the mesh in the net it might also gill net them, so you have to take that into consideration.

If you stock 4" LMB then you don't have to worry about protecting them.

Welcome to the fish hauling world!

I cannot advise you on how much fish to haul using a bubbler as I use pure O2 to haul fish. AND I monitor the O2 levels in the tanks with an O2 meter. (YSI ODO Pro) I check O2 levels 15 minutes after loading the fish, 1/2 hr after loading the fish, then if it seems to be stable, every hour after that and adjust the flow rate on every tank individually using flow control meters. Air has 21% O2, so a person can't haul near as many fish per gallon of water as a person that uses 100% O2. Plus you have Nitrogen from the air going into the water too.............

Using pure O2 I run roughly 1/2 pound of fish per gallon of water. How big were the CNBG? I can calculate their weight if I knew that.

Also, a pound of 2" fish will use more O2 than a single fish that weighs a pound.

Who did you go to to get the minnows?

I don't have many LMB but a lot of CNBG. I stocked 40lbs of FHM last year and I'm sure they were all gone before they had a chance to spawn. There may have been a lot of them that went over the spillway because they seemed to be thriving and then within a week or two I could not see any schools.
I was thinking about putting a 4' by 50' minnow seine from the end of a point to the bank this would give me about 250sq surface feet of area. I would add structure in that area for spawning. What do you guys think if that? I think I would need to feed also what would you use and do you think it is necessary to feed? My pond is 3 acres and I'm adding 150 LMB fingerlings. I was thinking about putting another minnow seine from the other side of the point to the adjacent shore to protect the LMB. I would feed these until about 6" and then remove the seine. What are your thoughts on this?
Thanks for any replies.

I had a huge failure yesterday. I bought 40lbs of golden shiners and 30lbs of fathead minnows and my aeration quit and lost them all. I will be reworking that to have a light on the tank to show when there is a power failure. What would you think would be the max lbs of FHM minnows in a 55 gal plastic drum with a bubbler aerator thru an air stone. On this trip I had 40lbs of the shiners in one tank and 30lbs of FHM in the other. I used this same set up to transport 4000 CNBG 1/2 in each tank last year with no problem. The CNBG may be a much hardier fish than the FHM.

Pay attention to what Bill said. We did a two year test at a customers place that had 4 ponds, all in the woods, all about the same size and same depth. We aerated one with a grid based aeration system, aerated one with a grid based aeration system and threw in bacteria, just threw in bacteria with no aeration and left one alone with no aeration and no bacteria.

We found that compared to the pond that we left alone:

The pond with grid based aeration had 4" less muck build up.

The pond with grid based aeration and bacteria had 6" less muck build up.

The pond with bacteria and no aeration had 2" less muck build up.

The pond that we left alone had roughly 8"-10" muck build up over the 2 year test.

If you don't want to or can't put up a fence, leave tall grass or tall dense marginal plants grow up around the pond to trap the leaves before they get into the pond. Then rake the leaves away or burn the whole pond bank in late winter before things start growing.

This.

I do it on the south side of my hatchery pond to keep the oak leaves out.

Pay in time and work to keep them out or pay to get them sucked out. Pay the price for putting a pond in the woods that is a problematic decision. Tree leaves in a pond are bad for the water quality especially a swimming pond. Contact this place in Dearborn MI. A swim pond in a woods with lots of leaf input would probably need to be leaves removed every 3 to 5 years. I have known ponds in a woods that get up to 1 foot of leaves each year.
https://sedimentremovalsystem.com/

Centex, I see you, at one point above, called your pond a tank. I knew without looking that you were from Texas. Hang in there.

Stop them from getting into the pond in the first place. Put 24" tall snow fence all the way around the pond to stop them from blowing in. Other than that, there is no "easy" way to get them out - just like there is no easy way to get them off of your lawn. (unless your tractor has a tow behind leaf blower).

Keep feeding when you are for the same length time until you can be there at that time to observe the feeding response. I can feed in my pond at noon and you'd think there wasn't a fish in it. 1/2 hour before sunset is a completely different story. If you saw the fish responding to the feed, you might not want to swim in the pond. LOL

Steve:

Send me a PM with the pond address. I can map it from a satellite to verify the size. Go Daddy decided that they wouldn't support the web store format and couldn't transfer any of the data to their new system so I am looking into a new store format.

From where the compressor will be placed the first diffuser needs to be in the deepest part of the pond. That will give you an idea of the length of self sink tubing you will need. If the compressor will be at the edge of the pond, it needs to be inside a cabinet that has a fan to suck out the hot air - similar to a large desktop computer fan.

If the compressor will be in a building away from the pond, then you will need to trench in 1" black poly pipe to the edge of the pond and switch to self sinking tubing. If you need more than one diffuser, you will need a manifold box at the side of the pond or a manifold inside the cabinet that the compressor is in at the side of the pond.

Thanks for the info. My 1/2 acre pond is only 8' deep at full pool, that's why I'm looking at a smaller pump. I have lots of weed and algae problems with this pond. It's about 40 years old. Esshup, I checked out your website, but I couldn't find specific info, pricing etc. Would you guys recommend one or two diffussers for this type of pond? Thanks again.