Pond Construction 101: Saving a Few Bucks Can Prove Costly

I made a previous blog post in which I talked about how there are things for which it makes total sense to prioritize price over everything else, and there are things where putting price above quality can prove very painful, and costly, in the long run. You wouldn’t choose a heart surgeon based on price, and I would submit that you shouldn’t choose a pond builder on that basis.

There are lots of general excavation companies that will tell you they can dig a pond. The problem is, there isn’t a specific license required to build ponds; there is for excavation, but pond construction is as different from building a house pad, or placing a septic tank, as driving a car is from flying a plane. Anyone above the age of sixteen in this country can take a written test and drive around the block and get a driver’s license; a pilot’s license requires hundreds of hours of flight time and multiple test flights, and every one of those hours and all of those test flights put the pilot and his or her passengers’ lives at risk. Hiring the wrong company to build your pond may not endanger your life - although it could, depending on where your house lies in relation to the pond - but it can result in a dry hole in the ground that cost you tens of thousands of dollars (or more, depending on the size of it), or a pond that won’t grow big fish, or one that is a constant eyesore with undesirable aquatic vegetation.

How much or little a pond builder knows about the required steps to take in building your pond determines whether the pond will hold water. And a pond can even be built to where it holds, but will not stay full, because of how it was sized and placed. Licensing bodies for general contractors don’t require any of this knowledge, because again, there is no specific license for pond builders; there isn’t a written test we have to pass; if there were, my job would be much easier, because most of the companies building faulty ponds would no longer be able to do so. But, unfortunately, there is no test, and no license required, to dig a pond for someone, beyond a general contractor’s license with a certification in excavation.

Probably at some point in your life you have encountered someone who had been in his field for many years and had done a great amount of work, but still did a poor job for you when you hired him. I can’t tell you how many times I have been called by this or that landowner to come look at their hole in the ground that wouldn’t hold water, and learned that the man who had dug it for them came recommended, said he had dug many ponds, etc.

We get dozens of calls every year from landowners that have dry holes in the ground, wanting to know if we can fix the leak. Some of them hire us; most get discouraged when they find out it costs more to fix a leaky pond than it does to build a new one. (Note: there are shysters out there who will tell you you just need to add a little of this or that polymer product to your water, and it will seek out the leak like a heat-seeking missile and magically repair it; I have never wasted time with those products because I have seen dozens of posts over the years on various forums where a pond owner was excited to use one of said products, and said he would report back later with the results, and never once did any of them report back; and, beyond that, we have had not one but a few different customers who didn’t take our advice and tried one of the polymers anyway, and every single one of those individuals ended up having clay brought in to fix the leak because the polymer didn’t work.) The only reliable way to address a leak is to address the entire basis of the pond, when the pond is dry; to do so is not cheap. And there is no frustration like dreaming for months or years of having your own picturesque pond, only to end up with a dry pit that people constantly ask about, “Why doesn’t it hold water?”

But sometimes the dozer drivers succeed in building a pond that holds water. At that point, you’re home free, right? Because that’s all there is to building a pond - just dig a hole, and if it fills up and stays mostly full, you just add fish and you’re set, right?

There is as much difference between an improperly-dug pond that holds water and one that is optimized for fish as there is between a parking lot and a five-star hotel. Both required general contractors to build; both required specialized heavy equipment, and trained workers; and the similarity ends there. You can spend a very pleasant evening in a room in a five-star hotel in Alaska, or in its lobby or its restaurant or its lounge, in the middle of January; if you spend that same January evening in the parking lot, and you don’t have a full tank of gas in your car and you don’t keep your engine running all night with the heat on full blast, you will die. And there is as much difference between a pond dug by someone with extensive knowledge of the species of fish you want to manage your pond for, and a pond dug by someone with zero knowledge of fish, as there is between that parking lot and the five-star hotel.

Fish have specific requirements for their environment in order to be able to survive, and every species of fish is different. If you stock Atlantic salmon in your Tennessee pond in January, they will be dead as a hammer by mid-April or early May, because the water in your pond will get too hot for them. Likewise, if you stock peacock bass in your Tennessee pond in May, they will be happy as bugs in a rug for a few months, and then they will become buzzard food in October because the pond will get too cold for them. This may seem obvious; but even largemouth bass and bluegill have temperature requirements, and if your pond is built by someone who is clueless about said requirements, you stand a very high chance of getting a pond that at a minimum puts your fish under stress for large chunks of the year, in turn shortening their lifespan, or, at worst, subjects them to severe stress for several months out of the year such that your fish will all die young and you will never have big fish, of any species.

Ponds that are permanently limited in what can be achieved with the fish population due to how they were dug aren’t the exception - they’re the norm. My company has worked on thousands of private ponds and lakes all across the Southeast; I would estimate that at least 75% of all of the ponds I have ever worked on, if not 80% or more, were permanently limited simply by having been dug by someone who knew nothing about fish.

And it’s not just conditions for the fish that are impacted, dramatically and permanently, when a pond is dug by someone with no knowledge of what it takes to build a quality pond. My company has never built a highway; as a result, I don’t know the first thing about what is required to build a safe, functional highway. Unfortunately, most general excavation companies have no more knowledge of aquatic plants than I do asphalt; and it shows, in every pond they dig.

I had to take a very lengthy test to get my commercial applicator’s license, the license required to apply aquatic herbicides to any pond. That test requires significant knowledge of aquatic plants. As you might imagine, obtaining a master’s in fisheries science requires one to learn about aquatic plants.

But, here again, there is no license required to build a pond beyond a contractor’s license. You don’t have to be a commercial applicator to be a contractor; and I have yet to come across a general excavation company that had anyone on staff that was a licensed applicator, or that had any knowledge at all of aquatic plants.

A pond can be dug to minimize excess aquatic plant growth; but if the excavator knows nothing about aquatic plants, it’s not likely that he’s going to stumble into the correct approach. How do I know this? Because almost all of the ponds we work on every year that have excess vegetation were dug improperly, and the faulty construction is causing the weeds, and it can’t be fixed without draining the pond completely and re-working it.

Imagine you saved for years to build your dream house; you had it all laid out in your mind; you could see walking into it once it was finished, waking up in it every morning, having celebrations and holidays in it, growing old in it. Would you hire the cheapest home builder in town, and tell him your budget was only enough for a shack, but you were confident he could do something good for that price? Don’t self-sabotage your dream pond or lake to save a few bucks. When you’re catching twelve-pound largemouth or two-pound bluegill out of your very own pond, on your land, you’ll be glad you did it right.