Had my small catfish pond dug out , removing the liner and surfaced with gumbo clay. It’s about 60 ft diameter and 6 ft deep. Been filling it for about a week got to approx 2 ft from top and it seems to have slowed to a stop for the last day. I figure it might be wicking and sealing itself. Had a huge rain at 4 ft water level created a crevice that I hoed in to fill but yesterday it seemed to not get fuller. Could this crevice be the culprit as it isn’t compacted like the rest of the pond? Clay is 18+ inches deep at walls. I stopped filling it last nite and this morning I was down 12 inches. It has slowed now to where it may be below the crevice damage. Any thoughts, solutions , need help thanks

Did the rising water level from the big rainstorm overtop your pond bank/levee?

If so, you need a pond outlet that can handle your biggest rain event, OR a pond outlet than can handle most rain events with an emergency outlet that can assist in handling the biggest rains. Until your pond is fixed in that regard, any catfish you are growing would be at great risk of loss.

If water if infiltrating through your re-filled crevice, then you should still see some evidence of the water down the bank. Is all of your land rain-soaked, so you can't tell where your leak is located?

Finally, yes it is very difficult to impossible to fill a crevice while water is flowing and get it to seal. Adequate compaction is very difficult to achieve in that case. There are even stories on Pond Boss of people that have compacted repairs into place after a dam was cut by water erosion and then the repair later washed out because it was not "tied" very well to the surrounding material.

I suspect this is NOT the news that you want to hear, but you probably will need to drain the pond down, wait for drier conditions, dig out and widen the crevice, and then compact and join the material to the adjacent bank edges.

Hopefully, one of our "dirt" experts will drop into your thread and give some better advice.

Good luck on restoring your catfish pond!

Thanks for the response,
No the water didn’t flow over the pond edge, it was about 4 ft from the top edge when the crevice formed. I had put sod down around the edge of the pond to slow water but it was not established as it had only been down 2 days. I have graded the area where the water flow occurred to attempt to mitigate future issues. The soil is vary porous where I live, I had the clay trucked in to line the pond. I filled the crevice post rain, I went out in the morning after the rain and found the issue and got out the hoe and rake to fill it. We’ve had a moderate rain since the issue and I found no sign of water intrusion at the same location so I might have succeeded in my grading fix.

Good deal that is does not appear to be leaking.

By "crevice", I thought you meant a v-cut all of the way through your bank. Instead, are you referring to an erosion channel in the face of your bank?

If so, that is a much better problem to have. Yes re-grading is the correct fix. Any time water flows are channelized, the erosive capacity greatly increases. Your well-graded slope should spread the flow of rain water evenly down the bank, and cause very little erosion until your groundcover vegetation is well established.