Pond Building - the less clay content or poorer the quality of clay in the soil the MORE important it becomes to have the best pond builder. Remember you BUILD a pond and dig a hole. Holes always leak. A well built dug style clay lined pond in NE Indiana should only loose 12"-16" of water due to evaporation during a dry summer. More water loss than 16" is almost always due to leakage. Northern Indiana has between 32"-40" of precipitation per year. This is more than enough rain water to keep a well sealed dug pond full each spring. A watershed, runoff pond is a very different topic.
A dug style pond is a very different construction method compared to a water shed pond built in a low area with a dam. You mention building an upstream small forage pond. Ponds with any sort of stream will just about guaranteed to have green sunfish who are in every Midwest tiny ditch / stream. Plan for them to be present.
If you are a 1st timer building a pond, here are two books you should have. These books can prevent some expensive mistakes.
https://www.pondboss.com/item.asp?id=11https://www.pondboss.com/item.asp?id=163If I was building a pond larger than one acre and the fishery was the primary goal for the pond, I would seriously consider enhancing the amount of fish habitat and cover by building a underwater hump that is within 4 to 6 ft of the surface. This will provide an off shore weed bed or area littered with artificial structure that increases the offshore habitat. In my experience it is important to keep a large percentage of the shoreline slope steep (2:1 or 2.5:1) to minimize weeds and filamentous algae. One remote area of the large pond can have the shallow areas or less steep slope. That method keeps your weeds and artificial habitat off the most used part (maybe swimming) of the "front" esthetic area of the pond. Your problematic weeds will always grow in shallow water which make shoreline fishing very difficult. Ponds need weeds to compete against the filamentous algae which is almost a constant problem in Midwest ponds. Large ponds have lots of shoreline thus they can and will grow lots of weeds that can be very EXPENSIVE to treat and manage because the area or volume of water is LARGE. Large ponds make manual weed removal very difficult and expensive which is why I do not like large ponds. Y
Your contractor will want to incorporate lots of shallow shoreline because it creates the perception of a larger area of water and for them it makes more money by moving less dirt. However they do not have the problem of WEED managing in all that shallow (2'-4') shoreline shallow water areas. Expanses of these shallow areas are WEED FACTORIES. They are productive fish areas BUT very difficult to manage and difficult for anglers to fish the shoreline. Weedy shorelines usually require anglers to fish the outside edges of weed beds from a boat similar to lake fishing.
