Hello all, and very happy to be a new member.
I have just finished my first pond! very excited! It is filling with water as I write this. The pond is small, at less than 1/4 acre and will be 6' deep at the deepest point. The water source is a natural spring that originates on our property and runs down a small ditch through our yard and never quits flowing (5-10 gal/minute maybe).
I started with the intention of just scraping out a small and shallow bowl with the tractor and boxblade and using the material to build a small dam around the lower edge (dam being 2-3 feet tall.) It was working great, but in the end I had to rent a track hoe to finish it up and this is when the project changed a bit: I was working with the track hoe from atop the dam, digging dam fill from the floor of the pond (good clay) and building up the dam in front of me as I drove over it/ compacted it, and would move on a little farther. This was working great, but it took way more fill than I thought it would to created the dam, so when I was finished I had dug the pond 4-5 feet below the original grade and the sides of the new and giant hole were now too steep to get any equipment into it.
SO: the result is a pond with a nicely built, smootly sloped and well compacted dam, but a pond floor that I was never able to compact. It is just super soft and loosely dug up clay over the entire bottom: almost like I had run it over with a roto-tiller.
I figured it would be under water, so let it begin to fill up. It is filling nicely and holds water so far (3' deep now after 24 hours) but I waded into the pond after a few hours and sunk up to my knees into the clay mud mixture that covers the bottom due to my lack of planning and its lack of compaction.
My questions are this: will this mucky soft layer ever settle on its own? If not, is there anything I can do short of draining and re-compacting to lessen the softness of the bottom and its probable likelyhood of kicking up silt into the pond every time we swim or stir up the bottom?
sorry for the long post and thanks so much for any input! - Harris