Pond Boss Forums POND CONSTRUCTION Building a dam New 9 acre lake in Northeast Texas

David feel free to contact us for a stocking plan to meet your goals. Also I will be in Shrveport this fall if you are interested in a consult to help provide habitat plan for the lake and other management information.

FYI I work on many lakes that leak when the core is not packed with a packer. My advice get them to rent vibratory roller to pack while the pan brings in the clay. Also the trees canbe a big help for cover needs, save soem to place in fairly shallow water near your designed spawning tables. Godo luck looks like a good project.

The dam is 95% complete with mostly dressing it out with Top Soil remaining. He did not use a vibrating packer on the core, but a loaded scraper running over every new layer of clay i feel will be sufficiant for packing. Its hard to take close up pictures with my phone that show the true size of the lake. This evening I believe that I will try taking some pics from the top of the hill with my camera to see if that does any better. It is really coming along now. He is clearing trees for my housepad this week and will start clearing trees for my shop pad by the weekend.

Looks like a good dam from the pic.

That Pic was taken roughly 1100' from the dam at a Northern water line.

If there is one thing that I have learned whenever you undertake a HUGE project like this is it pays to do it right the first time LOL.

A leaky dam is a PITA on a one acre pond.

That looks like a lot of clay there. It sounds like you have a good dirt guy so I hope that everything works out perfectly for you.

You know, I used to make fun of my ex wife for following other people's "blogs" on stuff...usually DIY home projects or whatever...now I feel just like her. I wake up and I'm like, "Man, I hope that there are some new pictures of the pond" LOL.

The pond is now complete. They just installed the 24" riser over the weekend. I spread rye grass seed over dam this weekend as well. Now we are just waiting on Rain and we are going to need a whole bunch of it! lol. I will get some detailed pics of dam very soon. The dirt man is finsihing my road now.

Hopefully yall can zoom in on these photos. We have got a good slow rain the last few days that has really helped the Rye Grass seed that I put on the dam. But I think im going to go ahead and buy more seed and spread out more.

any structure for the pond?

I will be building man made structure for it. PVC trees placed where I want them. My dirt guy kept telling me to leave the trees and stumps every where for structure. I made him push them all up and burn them except at the shallow end of lake. The last thing that I wanted is a bunch of trees in the pond to get hung on every time I cast.

Its been a little while since ive posted any pics. But not much has changed. We havent had any sunstantial rain since we finished the dam. Christmas day Santa finally braught me my wish which is rain. I think we ended up getting 4" which I was very thankfull for. My little pond finally filled back up so now when a good rain comes i will get double the run off.

Looks like the rye is growing. That's a very good thing.

David,
Did you use a syphon pipe or some other overflow system? Which side of your dam is your emergency overflow located? What size riprap did you use? Do you have any pic of these things?

Do you have a stocking plan yet?

With any luck you should be seeing some retention with these rains.

Thanks.

Were you able to get your Core of Engineers permit for this?

I used 24" pipe for my over flow system. It rises on the back side of the dam with a butterfly valve at the bottom of it so that I can lower the level of the pond when needed.
I didn't use any riprap rock anywhere.

Why would I need a Core of Engineers permit?

David,
You should not need a Coprs of Engineers permit in Texas for a farm pond dam. How tall is your dam? How deep will you pond be?

15' deep . Dam is 18' tall at one point but the majority of the dam is much less.

You should not need one. When I talk to them, I was exempted because it was a farm pond. I can't see you needing one with yours being smaller than mine and holding less water.

Legally you need a core of engineers permit to build a lake they are getting REALLY strict about this kind of stuff now.. It could be some REALLY bad implications if you don't. I have heard of prison time and at the least fines and not to mention busting the dam

I think that's on a state-by-state basis.

I check with the TCEQ and the Corps before we built, and in Texas we are exempt from permit with the ponds we built. I also talked with the NRCS and got plans to start from and then we went bigger and wider just to be sure we had a really good dam. We also added a bit more freeboard to help prevent problems in the future.

In short, in Texas you have the right of capture of 200 acre-feet of water in a pond, and as long as your dam in short enough and there is no threatened structures down stream, you are good.

Of course, consult your dam attorney if you want legal advise!!!

That's funny, I just now got it. I'm old and slow.

Nrcs office helped me lay out my pond when I first got started. It was never mentioned.

I think Texas has a lot of advantages that other states may not have. You can do most anything you want if property rights and state rules are followed.

When we built our puddle, the dam turned out to be 1050'. There were no issues or permits, but we were careful to have the overflow go directly into the existing creek bed, and cap the water at the top of the property so it wouldn't back up into our neighbor's property.

Other than that, we could have built the lake 3' inside the property lines if we wanted to.

Amen