We bought a home in central Arkansas that had a small cattle pond. It wasn't very useful, and much of the land surrounding it was too low to keep clean. So, we hired someone to expand the pond. The pond was supposed to be about 3 acres and average 4' deep. The end result is probably 2.5 acres, but the pond is not as deep as expected. I think we can raise it a couple more feet by hiring some additional work, but I wanted to check with people who know more about ponds first.

The pond is stocked for fishing. Bluegill, Redear, channel cats, and largemouth bass. I paddled out on our canoe and measured the depths you see in the attached image. As you can see, the deepest spot was only 5' and the vast majority is 3.5' or less. Any chance this will be OK, or would it be wise to raise the pond a couple of feet?

I think a little deeper ( 2 feet) would be better but it will probably be ok in central Arkansas. No foot and a half of ice to deal with. Do you have a berm or dam you can raise or would you dig it out more?

If you try to add to the top, don't just pile dirt on. It will have to be mixed with the existing soils or it is guaranteed to leak and might not hold. The best way is to drain it and dig deeper. Of course, that's a pain in the butt after stocking and hoping it will dry enough to work with it.

Jim100, fortunately, the levee has room for the pond to rise 2'. The guy who dug the pond originally things he can just raise the berm. That'll cause the pond to creep uphill more on the shallow end, so I asked him to dig that down a bit. I don't want a bunch of shallow areas that will spawn weeds all the time.

We have a nice peninsula area that I'm hoping to keep. This is our favorite spot for hanging out, camp fires, and fishing. If we raise the pond a couple of feet, I might need to bring in some loads of dirt to keep this area from getting muddy.

Thanks for the input, guys!

Obviously no ice problems with a pond in Arkansas but my biggest fear would be with the heat in the summertime, at less then 5' deep, and that could drop another ft or more pretty easy in a hot dry summer, you could wind up with a good portion of your pond not much over two ft deep, that could make for some pretty hot water for fish to survive in. jmo, I would think 2 more ft of depth could be huge in this scenario. but Im no professional and should probably not be bumping my gums, just thinking out loud.

Gehajake, nope... no ice here! LOL! We do get hot and dry. So far, the pond is holding up great with the heat, but we haven't seen the worst of it yet. We'll see how it looks after 2 weeks of no rain and 95+ temps.

That said, I bought some fathead minnows the other day and introduced them to the pond properly. I think close to half of them died right away. The pond was 95 degrees! Maybe that's just too much for new little fish even if you work them up to the right temp gradually.