Pond Boss Forums POND CONSTRUCTION Soil questions Pond Liner or Clay

Thanks Rainman. Yes, in general terms I would say it drains back to approximately the water level of the previous levee before I added on. We discussed this a lot and really bladed that levee off good, several feet all over, to make it match and seal back.

Briefly, I used to have a black plastic pipe for my spillway. I don't have much watershed and the lake has never run over. When I raised the levee I capped that pipe off, wadded some towels into it and filled a few feet of it with concrete, then formed up the area around it and poured a concrete slab over it.

When we did the work in 2008 we cleaned off the back side of the levee and the only wet places were on the back side where the suspected leak is. That's where the willow trees grew fast too. We all checked it good, and there was none, and is no, sign of seepage from the black spillway pipe.

I see you think like me on lake construction. The best management tool is a drain pipe and valve to draw it down to work on, and yes I have one. When we put it in we used rubber seep collars as recommended and also poured concerte seep collars for extra security. During the 2008 construction we checked the drain pipe often and never saw any sign of seepage there.

Over a decade ago I added a 3 inch well so I could fill it up since the watershed wasn't big enough. This early summer was a good example of the seepage. I don't know how many hundreds or thousands of gallons of water that pipe pushes out in an hour, but it's a lot. Could probably fill a good size swimming pool every hour. I watched the lake and water levels close this early summer. I'd run the pump one day, and two days later the lake would drop back to the previous level. That's the equivcilent of 24 hours of that well running full blast in lost water due to a leak somewhere. A tremendous volume of water is moving out every day through that levee somewhere.

We didn't use a sheepsfoot compactor, just the dozer, which as you say isn't all that great.

Re your comment on evaporation, that's not the problem. The main lake one hill over may drop two feet in Aug-Sept, but it's a pretty tight levee. One big rain and it's full again and stays full. The leaky lake looks like it's just sucking it out till it drops about 6-8 feet, then seems to level off. This levee has baffled all of us.

I thought about the guess of a minimum of 15 inches per month drop, but that's off. I notice 1-4 inches a day, with 2-3 being the average drop per day, in the early summer. Sometimes it seems to level off a few days, then there it goes again. I can see the water lines on the levee, and it seems to drop and stop, drop and stop. But I don't think it's ever dropped 3-4 feet in a month. Two feet, or maybe more, seems to be about the pace. Just a horseback opinion, but I'm quite sure it doesn't drop 3-4 feet a month. I know the inches per day won't match with that, but again it seems to be intermittent. Last August it seemed to level off and I thought it had sealed up. In a few weeks it was dropping again.

This is my first day here. I'll see if I can learn to post pictures. I took about 35 today. I can send you a ton of them if you have a way to PM me your email.

Thanks for the time, consideration, and knowledge of your reply.