My water has never been -3" since full pool except when I open the bottom drain line. In my part of the US, we can go a month or a bit more without rain. But there are so many "springs"- water just comes out of the rock layers in the ravine, that it even though I'm only capturing 10-12 acres, it flows a couple weeks after every rain. And the pond is mostly surrounded by 50-80' trees. No clay liner on the bottom- just solid bedrock. Dam cored down to bedrock.
Yes, that was a cute little salamander. He was in the pool the overflow dumps into. My daughter thought he was adooooorable and had to hold it and pet it. They are regulars. Oh, and the toad eggs have hatched. The ones in the pond and the ones I brought home in a bucket.
(very understanding wife)
Stocked the BG, RES, LMB. They were ~3". The BG/RES ran 0.10-0.15 oz or so. The LMB, I dumped in 10 of them and got 1.85 oz. Have lotta pictures, but shan't bore you.
Put in a Gator full of crushed limestone. Very crushed- peppercorn size and smaller. The contractor was happy to let me shovel up stuff that had been spread off the pile. Can't get much more convenient than a mile away in the Gator. Flinging shovels full 30' out into the pond is good for the shoulders, but covered a good bit of the surface area. The pH the next day was up to 7.8-7.9. Still +/-0.1 over the day, so little swing. Rechecked alkalinity after limestone had been in a day. Still near zero at a couple spots around pond. Ran the calibration solution and it was spot on, so I think it's real. so a bit disappointing ALK isn't up. Give it a week and add another load of limestone if it hasn't come up any more? On the other hand, the pH is spot on, the water is green, and fish seem happy, so maybe very low alk isn't worth fighting. Thoughts?
Must say, the highlight of the weekend was day after stocking, I went and hand fed late morning just because I like to watch them feed. I saw a bass cruising (3-3.5" mind you) so I watched to see if he went for pellets. They are pellet trained. But he totally ignored pellets. (The feeding fish were 1-3"; the forage fish from last year and their progeny. The big 5" GSH don't come up usually.) Well, LMB was just under all the feeding fish.. he found one small enough I assume, made a quick dart and woo, I have a carnivore in the pond! A year of tending forage fish paid off.
