Pond Boss Forums POND CONSTRUCTION Building a dam The Saga Continues

Well it fixed the wet spot. I would not guarantee it fixed the leak. But the leak was small enough it was never much of a problem as far as the pond holding water. Keep in mind we are in an area that gets about 42" average rainfall per year usually with some pretty large (multiple inches at a time) rain events. So a small leak in a pond likely would only be a problem in the driest of years.

Our local NRCS guy told me when he was designing our pond that a lot of the local cattle watering ponds had minor leaks or seeps in the dams. But most of these ponds are built with only bulldozers and are nothing more than the top soil scuffed off where the dam will be, then dirt pushed up out of a ravine into the dam with the dozer doing a little compacting. Not at all the way a pond should be built but there are hundreds if not thousands built that way in this part of the country including the initial build of my old pond (I can remember the first time this old pond was cleaned out, but not when it was built because that was likely before I was born. D7 17A Cat cable operated dozer and I must have been 10 or 12 years old). We did at least compact the dam with a rubber tired scraper when we rebuilt it. I'm talking about half acre ponds to water cattle with little initial thought of fishing or recreation, which is what my old pond originally was.

There is usually a lot more planning, thought and process done in larger ponds with recreation and fishing thought about in the initial planning stages.

I'm a farmer with a dozer. Not a contractor nor professional pond builder. If I do something and it does not work there is no one to blame but myself. So I might do things no self respecting contractor would do. And if it does not work the dozer is there so I dig it out and do something different. On a small pond with lots of extra material to work with a patch on the back side of the dam might work. And it might not. I built almost an entire extra dam on top of and behind the old dam and this one appears to be holding.