Pond Boss Forums POND CONSTRUCTION Renovating a Pond or Lake? Proof that silt never dries...

It's been posted many times that it takes FOREVER for silt to dry. After breaching our dams we waited two plus years to excavate our ponds. Finally after a dry winter we were able to get in and do the finish grading...I was convinced it was finally dry...the top was absolute powder. That was until we started drilling holes for the dock. We were on the final hole when the skidsteer started to slide to the bottom. Once it started down there was no stopping it. It was 4:45 on a Friday and it looked like a storm was moving in. We were pretty convinced that this was about to be the most expensive fish structure ever! The second pic shows the machine we found working a field about 4 miles away...talk about luck. We had just enough chain to get it connected and pull things out.

All ended well, but I can personally attest to the Otto's oft quoted belief that MUCK NEVER DRIES BELOW 18". Period.

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Hmmm... Would have been some nice fish cover, albeit expensive as you said!

Ah, that's what you get when you have city boys behind the controls of heavy equipment!

Nice work getting her outta there in time, Matt. How much rain did you get last night/today? Looked like Wilbur was getting pounded...I only got around a half inch. Amazingly poor!

You're right about the city boys and heavy equipment. Nothing bigger than a bobcat or small tractor for me.

Don't know exact rain totals...but the heavy stuff was just about 10 miles south of our place. Between 3" and 8" for them. Looks like we got around 1.5"

I feel for you...hope that well was dug deep.

Did you get your post holes done? I hope so...congrats on the rain. I'll keep praying, meanwhile I'll continue to pump from 240' daily. Getting about 2-3" gains daily...but now it's spreading out into the 4 acre range - will be slow going.

This photo IMHO is ripe for a captioning contest:

Otto's Summer 09 excavating pledge class: Assume the position!

[for a paddlin, BSKI - nothing else!]

Treeplanter,
JHAP is right. Your pic does have "I need a caption" written all over it. We can do this one of 2 ways.
1) send me a copy of the original (full sized and hi res) so I can blow up and crop the subject area of the pic (send to my email listed in my profile)
2) be offended that we would even consider having a laugh over your unfortunate situation and not cooperate. In this case, please accept our sincerest apologies....we will just use the lower-res pic already supplied.

Brettski,

Let the caption contest begin! I assure you no offense will be taken...besides, I wasn't at the controls when it happened.

I'll get you a hi-res.

So how do you clean out a silted in lake?

You generally don't. It's a lot cheaper to raise the dam.

That's what we are doing on a friends pond. We will probably remove whatever we can reach with the backhoe and leave the rest. Then we are going to raise the dam 2-3 feet.

I would agree with David and others. If possible, simply raise the dam or a combination of that and getting an excavator to remove some of the silt from the banks.

Unfortunately in our situation we had a pond with beautiful 100+ year old bur oaks around it. Flooding those out was not an option. So we breached the dam, excavated what we could from the bank, then waited for things to start drying. It was a four step process for us. 1) Breach dams, wait 2) Begin excavating slop to let it dry, wait 3) Further excavate slop and create contours, wait 4) Finish grade. Not a fast process.

One key, as I understand it, was when we did the first excavation, we created a "channel" as close to our final depth as we could get. This gives the water in the silt a place to go. Basically gravity can then do it's work and "press" the water out. As long as you give it somewhere to go, you'll get some drying. Eventually we were able to get pretty good depth (12-14') in spots, 8-10 in others. Our goal was to get at least 20% over that 8-10' depth.

If I had the option, not doubt I would have simply added depth by raising the dam. But it IS possible to excavate. Just takes a lot of time and a little more money. I'll attach some photos of the process. Hope it helps. [img][/img]
This is one of the oaks we didn't want to lose...
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Here is the South half of the pond just after breaching the dam...you can see it was only a couple feet deep at the time.
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The first excavation process...absolute mush. We put as much as we could up and over the bank to give it somewhere to dry.
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After another season of drying, we were ready to go at it again...
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This shows finished product as we applied seed and erosion control. We're expecting it to erode easily, so we've added protection on all the banks where we moved silt.
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Now just waiting for rain!

First;City boys are not the only ones that have to have their equipment pulled out.

Will try and get pictures of clean outs.
It is best to start on the side not the middle.