Hello, I am a newbie in SW Michigan near Grand Rapids and I am planning a new 1/10 acre trout pond. After many months of research and trying to convince my wife that we need a pond, I finally got the ok to begin construction.
My wish list for the pond is (in order of preference)
1. I would love to fish for rainbow/brown trout in the pond.
2. I would also like some LMB and/or Perch as Bonus fish
3. I would like to be able to swim in a portion of the pond
I had a front loader tractor for a few hours and I scraped off the top soil and hit clay right away. My question is should I try to dig out the pond with the front loader or should I bring in an excavator? If I use an excavator do I need to do something to compact the clay?
Also, how should I structure the bottom of the pond and how deep should I dig it? I was thinking of keeping 5’ of shallow water for FH minnows to spawn and then going deep to 15’ quickly from there in the fish only section. Then in the swimming section have it drop off more evenly.
I am hoping to keep temperatures cold enough for trout by digging to 15’ and then using a diffuser for aeration. I was hoping to stock it the first summer with FH and maybe a predator or two and monitor the temps through the summer to see if I need to devise additional cooling strategies.
http://www.weathershop.com/temptrax.htm offers probes and computer tracking software that I may pick up to help with the monitoring.
