Growing Up #3: The pond

In Growing Up #1, you can see a big pond.   I was around 6 - 7 years old when my Dad put it in.  His idea was to stock it with trout so he, an avid trout fisherman, could go fishing year round.  The creek wrapped around the right and top sides of the pond. The stream fed into the pond at the bottom right of the screen and the water left the pond at its top left corner.  Dad had to put in screens at the entrance and exit culverts to keep the pond separate from the stream so (1) the stocked trout could not leave and (2) he could fish at anytime and not be limited by state fishing season rules.  At least that was the idea :)

Dad hired a firm to dig out a pond that was 9 feet deep at the bottom end and gradually sloped up to a beach (imported sand) at the top end.  The one thing I remember about that process was that they used a big front end loader like this filling up a dump truck.

Frontend loader and dump truck moving dirt

  

The truck then dumped the dirt along the top edge of the pasture. This worked fine until they hit a very sticky clay patch in the deep end and the loader got stuck.  I have this vivid memory of the contractor bringing a tiny bulldozer that was about as high as the loader wheel and using it to pull the loader out of the clay.  This little tiny machine rescuing the big one is something I will never forget.

One the pond was dug, the entrance and exit culverts in place with their screens, it filled pretty quickly and Dad stocked it with 1000 fingerling trout sometime around October to November.

Fingerling Rainbow Trout

Unfortunately for my Dad a few of these showed up. 

Common Merganser Ducks

They are large fish eating ducks who thought my Dad was the greatest as he provided them with food all winter long.  So that winter the routine was as soon as my Dad woke up, he would go outside to yell at the ducks.  The ducks would barely be able to fly off the pond as they were soooo full from all the nice rainbow trout my Dad had so thoughtfully provided for them.  They literally needed to run on the water for quite a distance before they could lift off.  This went on all winter long.  By spring time, Dad figured that he had just a few of the 1000 fingerlings left.

Several years later he found out another problem with the pond.  The creek on the right side was only separated from the pond by a 5 - 6 foot stretch of soil.  A few pairs of these critters moved into the

Muskrat

creek and proceeded to drill several holes through that 5 - 6 of soil so the pond was no longer separate from creek.  Between the ducks and muskrats, my Dad never did get a pond for fishing year round.  We did go fishing during season and every now and then would catch a nice trout.  We also used the pond for summer parties and even a wedding.