Mike Otto came out yesterday to help me make sure my dam situation was OK. The setup is pretty unbelievable, you got to see it to belive it. He said a lot of engineering work went into it including rerouting the main source runoff. I can leave all of the trees I want on the dam. If a couple of 30" tree stumps are not causing a leak, then the 2-4" trees there now will not be a problem. The pond cannot be made bigger without a ton of work and a lot of tree deaths, except using the original engineering in a different way. He said a simple concrete structure with a gate for water control in it can be placed at the end of the dam where the original builders routed the overflow around the dam into the original stream bed. I could get 1-2 feet of water in the pond using this:
in a structure like this but all concrete:
It would only be the 1-2 feet height I would need to raise the water level and basically act as a spillway. He said to make it completely out of concrete. Now the interesting option is I could raise and lower any time I want by the 1-2 feet. Hold a little extra for summer evap, lower in the winter for pond week killing. Or, maybe even better, lower in summer to plant wildlife food plots for ducks and flood it in the winter. I would probably get 1/2-1 acre of additional shallow pond, and I can't go any higher or the creek will flood a large portion of my forest unless I only kept it that high for 3-4 months. Hmm, 2 penstocks at different levels maybe?
