See no reason it will not as long as you have some good clay. Even without a sheepsfoot if the clay is good, it might seep slowly for a year or two but I would think eventually seal up with settling. Now if you have gravel veins or other junk, then you could have a problem.
It would seem to me a long term problem is where the soil is marginal and there is some specific pathway that the water flow can keep open. If it is just an overall seep through clay without enough flow in any one place to keep the finer particles washed out (in other words no erosion taking place) it would seem to me that eventually the seep will fill up with clay particles. Heck a water line under pressure with a pipe fitting that is seeping will eventually fill up and stop with calcium in the water in our neck of the woods. Not if the leak is fast enough to prevent particles from clogging the hole, then it will not.
I'm for sure no expert John. But if you have good clay, and make sure if you hit any gravel or rock veins you have plenty of clay over it and do as good of job compacting with the equipment available I think it will be fine. It might take it a year or so to stabilize.
But I am just guessing. The only pond I have worked on (6 now) that leaks to enough of a degree that it is noticable is my daughters. It has a new portion, and old portion that was cleaned out, and an old portion that still held water. I don't know if the leak is in the new part I built because of inadequate compaction or the old part. The old part held water pretty good before the renovation. (Just remembered I had cleaned out the old part ten or fifteen years ago with my old D7 3T series cable machine Cat I had back then) But my suspition is in the old part of the dam where I took out a 30" daimeter dead elm tree could be the culprit. I dug as much of the roots out as I could, but since it still had about half full of water in the pond (can't drain water up hill - I tried
and time was such pumping was not possible) so I know old roots were still in there. I also patched the old dam where I drained what I could so there are lots of potential places for leaks. The leak is not bad but her watershed is very marginal so the water drops a lot more than I like between substancial rains. Not much different than the situation you are in with your current pond or what some of the guys in Texas face, but it is the only pond I dug/cleaned out that did not turn out quite like I wanted.
