This is my first post and it's WAY overdue. I owe the success of our new pond to Pond Boss. After 13 months of looking for the right pond builder, I stumbled across Pond Boss and sent Bub Lusk an email asking for help. He hooked me up with "Dirt Artist" Dave Sefton.
I was fortunate enough to be invited up to Brownstown IL to meet Bob Lusk and spend the day while he was shocking some ponds and having a group discussion. Since I had never had a pond before, I had a million questions for Dave and Bob. They were both extremely patient and answered my questions in great detail and at my level of understanding. Bob's method of answering my questions was more from an educational style as appose to just feeding me data. He asked me almost as many questions as I asked him and "led" me to the answers as he provided the data, synthesized it into information and ultimate helped me build knowledge. Let's just say, I learned A LOT that day and enjoyed the opportunity.
I can't say enough good things about Dave Sefton. He and his wonderful wife, Joni, came out to our house multiple times to go over project designs, answer our questions and visit with our family. My wife and I had a vision of what our pond should/would look like when done but we didn't know enough about pond building to know what were realistic expectations. This is where Dave took our vision as we described it, our land as his canvas and began creating. I honestly don't know if he knew what it was going to look like before he started or just used his creativity as he went along. Either way, the result is far better than what we had envisioned.
I don't know if it was dumb luck, fate or whatever finding Pond Boss, Bob and Dave but I'm forever grateful that I did. My wife and I settled here after careers in the military to set down "roots" and start a family after many years of moving around the world. Our pond was a dream of ours that we saved for many years to afford and we weren't going to trust it to just anyone. We met with other excavating companies but didn't find the passion and interest we were looking for until we met Dave.
Our pond was built at the end of July 2012, yes, during extreme drought conditions. We had our first rain in over 8 weeks a few days before Dave started and then, as if we ordered it for the project, we had a few quick showers over the next few days to keep the dirt just moist enough to compact.
As soon I as I figure out how to get the pictures from my "file manager" to my post, I'll add photos.
Thank you for the comments. Yes, we did hit the mother lode with Bob and Dave. The full pool size is about 1.5 acres and the deepest spot is 17 feet. Thanks to hurricane Irene remnants and a couple other downpours, we have about 7 feet so far. Dave cut in spawning bed ledges at the appropriate depth, 3 coves and a beach area for the kids (BTW- my kids loved Dave and he did well putting up them bugging him the whole time). We added pea gravel to the spawning beds, some rock piles of RR3, 4 trees, a large bush and 5 PVC trees. We purchased a 23ft American Eagle windmill with 2 diffusers for aeration as well.
Stocked it with 750 Bluegill, 250 Red Ear and 10 pounds of Fat Head minnows at the end of October.
I forgot to mention the equipment providers in my original post. We rented a John Deere 200 excavator from RCI and a John Deere 700K dozer from ERB. The scraper work was done by a local contractor. Dave made it clear he wanted good equipment to avoid breakdowns so I called all the ERB reps within 100 miles and found the NEW (only 10 hours on it) 700K at the Cape store. The 700 worked great...until it broke down! We got 11 hours of work on it before the over temp sensor went out. This was on a Friday afternoon and the ERB folks quickly loaded up a 650J at the Fenton store and delivered to the site within a couple of hours. Both RCI and ERB were GREAT!
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