Pond Boss Forums POND CONSTRUCTION Renovating a Pond or Lake? Tracer dye's, milk, etc

The evaporated canned milk tastes good and doesn't turn your lips a shocking color. Using my mouth to blow the milk through a thin tube is really handy as the secret to finding a specific leak seems to be managing to just put a couple drops of milk in the water near the leak.

Otherwise the general clouding in the water makes it hard to see where the milk is going.

Tying the tube to a long stick and inserting something to make the opening narrow enough to control the outflow is also helpful.

And in the process of finding the location of another leak, I made another discovery. This is a bit gross, but when you wander around holding a small mouthful of canned milk in your mouth for about 5 minutes it gets mixed with saliva, and when you squirt it through the tube over a leak the saliva keeps the milk in a slimy cohesive unit that stays separate from the water, and goes into a leaks hole in one long white string. No clouding and general dispersion at all.

Otto, you are a brave man to ask what my plan is to fix my leak. Of course it involves my aforementioned trusty baseball bat.

I have found a source of bentonite and I will be using it to try and plug these leaks. The second one is a hole the size of my little finger.

I was thinking of draining the pond and keeping it drained for a week or two so it drys out a bit. Then I was thinking of using a sledge hammer to pond a baseball bat into the hole as if it was a stake, and then filling this hole with bentonite and a plug made of local clay pounded in on top. Does that sound like it might work? If it doesn't, when things dry out at the end of next summer I could always get an excavator in to repack the clay in that area.

I think there must be some sort of equation between inflow and water pressure and the rate of flow through a leak because it's possible to fill the pond and in heavy rain it has been completely full and overflowing.

What I am not sure of is if it is normal for the water level to sit at an inch or two above a leak if there is sufficient water coming in, and if it is some combination of increasing water pressure and increased flow through the leak that at some point causes the water to level off, though not always right at the same level as the leak, or do I need to go out with another mouthful of canned milk and search for another leak right at the exact place the water stops coming up?