Alright to give some back story on why I am draining my pond currently. This last winter I lost all of my fish, at least all of any size out of my pond due to ice/snow coverage. Since I am going to have to restock my pond I decided that I should fix some problem areas before restocking.
So here is a satellite picture of my pond from a couple of summers ago when we had a really bad drought. You notice the dried up shallow areas on the north(up) end. The blue arrows are where the pond gets the majority of its water from the neighbor across the roads yard thru to culverts. The yellow line is my current siphon path pictures further down in the thread. Orange dashed is the spillway from the pond. Red dashed is a drainage ditch that this pond several others and a large farm field drain thru.
My goal is to deepen these areas to the north back to a 3-5 range to help with the weed growth problems we fight every year due to them being so shallow. I plan to take this dirt to reslope the pond side of the damn to make it more mower friendly.
Now for the siphon, I built this siphon last friday and thus far i think I have dropped the pond 18" or so.
Float for siphon end.
siphon top side assembled.
siphon bottom side
Short video of the flow I am getting and the ditch I am draining into.
http://vid32.photobucket.com/albums/d34/...zps4a5b199d.mp4 Progress of Sunday mid day, stick was put in when I started the siphon Friday around 5pm.
North end of the pond Sunday evening, shows how quickly this area is draining out with minimal water level drop.
So my plan is to let this dry for a while and I am going to try to move a little of the dirt with my compact tractor and my dads. I suspect I will be calling around to excavators in the area to get quotes to move the dirt and reslope the banks though.
Really looking forward to hearing you guys opinions on what I am doing and any advice you can give on how to do it differently.
