Pond Boss Forums POND CONSTRUCTION Selecting a site Drone footage of pond build - Livingston Co., MO

Fall of 2020 was eventful for my BOY. We had a couple unwanted guests show up in the form of two adult otters. I am really fortunate to live less than 100 yards from my pond and can keep a close eye on it every day. Needless to say their stay was short (less than two days). It's amazing how far those things will travel to get from one body of water to another. I was surprised to see them show up and happy to see them gone.

That summer/fall was also unique in from a precipitation standpoint. We received just enough rain to keep things green and growing, but we didn't receive a runoff producing rain for almost 4 months! My forage pond was only half full from that spring and my main BOY of water was down almost 20". So, when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. I took the opportunity to spread shot rock all the way around my pond. Shot rock has fines all the way up to chunks that might weigh a couple hundred pounds. Since the water was low, I was able to use my skid loader and spread it down into the water and up the banks to slightly above the full pool level. It took about 250 tons of rock to get this done. Obviously, there are many benefits from an addition like this. I did it mainly for wave protection and added structure for crawdads and forage fish. I'm really hoping that crawdads will be a permanent fix in my pond with the amount of structure they have available. I probably should have put a heavy fabric under the rock before I spread it, but I was worried about the negative affects it would have on my crawdads. I can see the need for more rock coming, it breaks down itself as well as silts in a bit.

With the lower water I was also able to see several of my SMB beds that would normally have a couple more feet of water over them. They looked like they were still in good shape.

As for the fish, the rapid growth seemed to continue. Once every couple weeks we would throw the cast net out during feeding and pull in a pretty good haul. At this point, I had about every size of GSH imaginable for my fish to eat. It was about this time that I never saw another FHM again, which is hard to believe with their reproduction capacity and they amount I originally stocked.