Pond Boss Forums POND CONSTRUCTION Renovating a Pond or Lake? connecting two ponds

My existing 1/2 pond needs some renovating and I don't want to loose the fish. So I just recently completed another 1/2 acre pond 30 feet away from the existing one. My plan is to pump out the existing pond next spring and move the fish over to the new pond. do the renovations and then connect them. Has anyone on here done this before and how did you do it. I'm wondering if I leave the renovated pond empty and just break through or do I wait for it to partially fill up or do I pump the full pond 1/2 empty into the renovated one and then connect. Just want to make sure I'm not missing something

I did something similar - I took an existing 2.5 acre pond and build a 5 acre pond around it essentially...I had the larger levee constructed downhill and let it partially fill then had a trackhoe break the dam of the small pond, letting all the fish run into the big one.

Worked well and had the added benefit of having a pretty cool structural aspect to the big pond - they shaved the old levee down so that it would be 3-4 feet under water at full pool of the new pond, and with the deep channel cut through the middle of it when they broke the dam, it's a really neat underwater structure that you can always count on having fish holding on it.

The only regret I have is not cleaning some of the decades of muck out of the old pond before it refilled as an arm of the new pond. I wish I'd done that to increase the depth of that channel. Otherwise it worked out just fine.

So you didn't loose any fish this way? I assume that the new pond was deeper then the old so it all flows down hill?