Hello, I am a newbie in SW Michigan near Grand Rapids and I am planning a new 1/10 acre trout pond. After many months of research and trying to convince my wife that we need a pond, I finally got the ok to begin construction.
My wish list for the pond is (in order of preference)
1. I would love to fish for rainbow/brown trout in the pond.
2. I would also like some LMB and/or Perch as Bonus fish
3. I would like to be able to swim in a portion of the pond
I had a front loader tractor for a few hours and I scraped off the top soil and hit clay right away. My question is should I try to dig out the pond with the front loader or should I bring in an excavator? If I use an excavator do I need to do something to compact the clay?
Also, how should I structure the bottom of the pond and how deep should I dig it? I was thinking of keeping 5� of shallow water for FH minnows to spawn and then going deep to 15� quickly from there in the fish only section. Then in the swimming section have it drop off more evenly.
I am hoping to keep temperatures cold enough for trout by digging to 15� and then using a diffuser for aeration. I was hoping to stock it the first summer with FH and maybe a predator or two and monitor the temps through the summer to see if I need to devise additional cooling strategies.
http://www.weathershop.com/temptrax.htm offers probes and computer tracking software that I may pick up to help with the monitoring.
