Pond Boss Forums Thread Like Summary - Structure in our new pond

We just put in our third pond, it will be primarily for family entertainment swimming and fishing. We will be building a house right next to this one so my wife has had a lot of say on the esthetics of it and I kind of wanted to keep her happy...after all I am getting a nice big pond!

Conservatively this pond is a little over an acre prolly closer to an acre and a half with the deep end being a little over 20' shallow end around 15' with a beach sloping down into it and a concrete dock. My wife was very specific about the shallower half of the pond being structure free because of the swimming and that most of the things we add in the deep end being deep enough to not ever affect swimmers. I was OK with that.

I didn't want any structure shallower than 8' just in case someone would dive in off the side of pond, and I didn't want anything wood that could decompose over time making the water dirty or changing the structure. Plan is to treat the water in this pond with some kind of Aquashade and a little copper sulfate to keep it a little tinge of blue and hopefully pretty clean.

So we scoured this site and the internet for ideas of what we could put in or make ourselves and found some really cool projects to work on. Wanted something that big fish could cruse and suspend on and provide cover for little fish and crawdads. We will be stocking the pond with a variety of species with the forage fish going in the year before predator fish are introduced.

We built some of the plastic trees anchored with cinder blocks and sakcrete along with a few buckets and tubing/edging, split a couple plastic trash cans and ran tubing through anchored with cinder blocks, used pavers and bricks for crawdad hotels, made a cinder block wall, dumped 18 ton of cabbage head sized stone in a pile, made a wall of old clay tile 4' high, used some miscellaneous plastic tile and concrete culvert pieces with cinder blocks to make a little castle. Anything needing wired to blocks was done with thick stainless wire.

The bigger structures were kept pretty deep, the brick/paver structures on slope should be around 12' with the split trash cans being around 8'-9'.
We also had our contractor dig a ledge into one back corner that will be at 6' deep when pond is full that is 10' wide by 30 yards long ,we will cover that with sand and ad some flatter paver structures to it out from the bank.

This is how it turned out;

Structure, shade, and soaring Greek columns!

The bass that take up residence under your concrete dock are going to think they are living in the Ritz-Carlton!

I think for structure to be its most effective is when it's in water 6 feet or less. That's where most of the feeding and breeding will take place. Awesome looking pond though, can't wait to see future pics of it.

Nice.

Nice work !! Like the thought process. Will you have aeration? If not will oxygen be available at the structure depth (thermocline question) all year ?