I like your plan to set the water level to turn some of your draws into nice coves!
In addition to good fishing, that gives you some bonus options. Some of the people on Pond Boss use their coves as forage ponds or as habituation areas for newly stocked fish. Usually with blocking nets.
I was considering making some artificial coves on our next pond build and narrowing the connection to the main pond with the dirt spoils. You could then much more easily manage a blocking net, or I was even considering building a cinder block structure with a gate to open or close the cove as needed.
For example, anthropic recently performed a shock survey on his bass pond and found out it was sorely lacking for BG in the 3-5" range. If you used a cove as a forage pond, you could put in some brood BG and then feed in the cove until their offspring reached the 3-5" range and release several thousand BG of optimal size into your 13-acre pond.
That might pay out your additional dirt work and improvements in the first year!
I was thinking of building a forage pond or two above my regular pond in some draws, I have plenty, my thoughts were build them above the main pond with a 4 or 6" drain at the bottom to be able to drain or almost drain them into the big body of water, maybe just holding enough of them back for breeders. a person could always pump water back up to fill the forage pond and restart the process.
With the connected cove I would think it would be hard to transfer them into the main pond other then just opening the gate and letting the two sides mingle into one, but then how would you get all the predator fish out of the forage pond area to restart your forage? just thinking out loud here
