Pond Boss Forums GENERAL QUESTIONS Property Projects & Construction Looking for a good pond guy

Hello, I'm looking for a good pond guy in the Lampasas Tx area
Holler back please if you can recommend someone.
Thanks

Elaborate a bit.. For digging/building a pond, managing?? What are you looking for?
Quite a few folks here from the Tx areas considering the birthplace and Home of PB. :-))

Digging, stocking managing, maintaining or?

Here's the story.
I had a small tank dug last spring. The tank man said it looked like a good choice of location and the material was promising. Hopeful depth about ten feet and about 80 foot diameter at the expected water level. I'm not sure what material exactly it is dug out of but mostly caliche/limestone, typical Texas hill country stuff. Took a while before I had good rains but the deepest it got was about 7 foot but will lose a foot or more over night and within days it will return to about 3 feet, including about ten inches of mud bottom. This has occurred maybe a half dozen times over the last year. During that time I drove out to Comanche Tx and bought 6000 pounds of sodium bentonite. I spread this around the circumference about a foot above the low water line and several feet past into the water. The bottom seems to hold fine so I did not concentrate a bunch of the bentonite toward the middle but I imagine a good amount of it ended up there. The neighbors cows worked it over pretty good but still the same leak.. There is a visible rock layer on one side that may extend all the way around but I cant be certain. This ledge is several inches below the low water line and this is the area I concentrated the bentonite in but the clay didnt help. So this spring the fellow that dug my pond arranged for another individual to come out with a backhoe and work the shore line where the leak is suspected. Trying to break up the underlying rock and fill and mix together. The result after the last rain was about two foot of water that drained out overnight. So less head pressure but faster leakage.
Problem is worse at this point.
There is no evidence of leakage around the pond in fact the leak is sub level of original surface.I suspect all the water is resurfacing down hill where a small rock bottom gulch exists Looking at it it looks to be at about the same level as the suspected leak. Problem is its only wet when it rains and with existing drainage it is difficult to know where all the water is coming from.
I have decided that instead of trying to fix the leak to just overwhelm it by filling in about 4 feet of the depth with some good material, mix all of the new material in with the mud/bentonite bottom layer.
So, I am trying to find a good tank guy in my area to come out, take a look, and give me an opinion on which way to proceed. It only rains so much in my area and it kills me to watch the same thing over and over.
Thank you

Yeah, that don't sound like much fun..
I'll yield to the Texas boys on this. Sounds like a good layer(s) of high plasticity clay is the only way to fix that situation.
The guys that are familiar with your area will be along I'm sure.

Hey Bones,

I would send Teehjaeh57 here on the forum a PM. He is a pro when it comes to sealing leaking ponds. He might be able to help with a less expensive solution. He is always willing to help PBF folks and I am sure he would be happy to discuss your problem and offer some sage advice.

Bill D.

Good point Bill.. I thought about mentioning TJ. He's like the Mikey of fixing leaks. :-))

Thanks for the tip, I have arranged for a pond guy to hopefully come out this week and discuss my problem. I will wait to see what he recommends before including someone else and possibly wasting their time. Thanks again..

Considered pumping that sucker dry and looking for an obvious leak? I’ve had either no luck or no skill hunting leaks.

Having built several ponds and fixed a few leaky ones, the full pool water level is probably not where your problem lies, you say that it leaks down to about three fow and sorta stays there, you will probably find your leak is right in that general elevation, a rocky layer is extremely hard if not impossible to seal long term, even if you get it to hold for a while it will more then likely give problems down the road. You might want to consider a pond liner material, expensive, but just a thought.
Good luck, keep us posted