I own 55 acres of reclaimed mine land in SO. IL. that is very rocky. It was mined about 40 years ago and the broken rock is mixed all through the soil. During the reclamation process two ponds were built on my property one of which holds water fine and the other leaks a bit. I bought the ground for a retirement home and a place to train my Labrador retrievers. I want to build a technical training pond, i.e. one with lots of levees, islands etc. There is a perfect drainage on the property for this and it even holds some water already now in the lowest spot. Short of hauling in clear soil there is no way to get rock-free soil to build the dam. I only want it to be deep enough for the dogs to swim in and about 2 acres in size. My question is can you build a small dam with rocky soil that will compact enough to hold water? Hauling in good clay would be prohibitively expensive. Of course I would remove the bigger rocks but there will be lots of rock baseball size and smaller that would still be in the soil.