Thanks for the input guys.

Pipe is too far gone to weld. Otto's right, there are certainly other places it's going, too. The exposed end of the barrel is in really bad shape, so I'm sure most of the metal is past repair.

One guy thought we could drop about a hundred sacks of quickrete down around the riser and let them form a new tube around it. Seemed reasonable until we really thought about it.

Had the son of the guy who originally built the ponds out. He says the records are gone but the ponds are at least 30 years old, quite possibly more. He still runs the contracting company and thinks maybe a shotgun tube about 40' away from the current riser may be best. We also considered just plugging the drain and letting the spillway take care of overflow, adding crushed concrete and rock to alleviate any erosion issues. I think we'd only get water over the spillway a few times a year but I'm worried about fish going over when it flows. We could raise the pond level a foot and a half, maybe two, with this hare-brained scheme without compromising the dam at all.

OK, tell me if there's a way to retain the fish and just how bad the idea of plugging the drain without replacing it is.

One other thought is to plug the drain and install a shotgun tube near the top elevation of the spillway. That is, go out (toward the pond) far enough to get an elevation drop of six inches or so, install a shotgun tube through the spillway at a pretty shallow angle of drop, cut the inlet end of the tube more or less "flush" with the ground and intall a trash grate sort of like a storm sewer grate might look. Ponds could fill up to the new elevation of the shotgun tube and, when really going, flow over the spillway.

This seems workable to me (and much easier and cheaper) than getting the equipment and tube past the spillway to the dam. Access is much easier and we'll have to take out many less trees to get this done.

Does that make sense? What do I not understand?

Rocky, your suggestions might work, but I'm going to have to get some serious gear through the woods and trash a bunch of timber to do that. I think we could do the shallow shotgun with just a backhoe and a tractor.

Thanks again for the ideas and consideration. I really like the dynamite idea, TG, mainly because it makes such a big bang. I like explosions. If there was a way (and a really good excuse and the fish wouldn't be upset about it)...

Mark