I want to build a dock on my 1+ acre pond. The pond is located about 150 feet from my back door, in what was originally a swampy oxbow from a nearby creek channel. I built the pond about 7 years ago, and stocked it with fatheads, bluegill, and channel cats the second spring. The third spring I stocked LM bass from a local rancher's stock tank. The overall balance seems to be working great. I've got 5+ pound bass, with a sizeable population in the 2 to 3 pound range.
The water level is amazingly constant, largely due to the high water table in the area, and also because of two springs on the hillside that my house is on (springs flow year-around). There's always some amount of flow through the pond, evidenced by a trickle from my outflow culvert.
Now my question:
I would like to build a dock on my pond for several reasons -- to be able to flycast from, to tie my canoe up to, to have a BBQ from as the sun is setting, to swim from and sunbathe, etc. I believe that a permanent structure would be best (pilings rather than floats), but I've never built one before. I can draw one up on paper, but there are numerous design aspects that I'm not certain about.
How do I go about sinking the pilings? Driving them with any kind of machinery would be next to impossible, as the ground is very mushy around the perimeter of the pond. Has anyone drilled/jetted large diameter PVC pipe into the floor of a pond and then cemented PT posts into the tube? That's the direction I'm leaning at this point...
What type of lumber is recommended today? The standard .40 CCA that we used to buy several years ago is pretty much gone, and has been replaced by a non-arsenic treatement (.25 CC). Is this stuff as good as the .40 CCA? I've been told that the new PT lumber requires hot dip galvenized fasteners or they'll rot away in no time. True?
Any other advice to the first time dockbuilder? Thanks -- Troy
