Bobad,

Thanks for the advice. My kind of pond guy -- already planning how to take care of the fish!

The sand in the valley is so permeable, that if you dig a hole, it will quickly fill with water to the level of the stream.

My idea is right on with yours. I could dig a pond anywhere in the valley and the stream would fill it without even being connected. I still want to try a small "armor-plated" dam in the stream channel. If I gain 5 feet of water level this way, then that is 5 feet less I need to excavate for the floors of my ponds.

I am worried about building the core trench for my stream-channel dam in saturated soil. We have major rivers in Kansas that sometimes go dry at the surface. It just looks like a channel 300 feet across that is full of sand. However, the water is still flowing slowly through the sand. The water pops back out to the surface when you get 10 or 20 more miles downstream.

I fear my little creek is a miniature model of this phenomenon. I know a trash pump can handle all of the stream flow during a dry season. However, I don't know how much flow I have under the sand. I need to briefly get rid of this water saturating the sand to build the core trench in my dam so that it is deeper than the lowest level of sand in my valley.

I do have two 1/2 acre excavated ponds on the land up out of the stream valley. They are in horrible shape and only hold water about a foot deep. I was planning on expanding one to 3/4 - 1 acre. The other could be re-designed and re-built to maybe 2 - 3 acres. These would hopefully be the main fish ponds that I could control.