Building a 5 Acre Pond! (Adding Rocks and Structure)

folks at home welcome back to the five acre pond building if you missed the first parts of this series i'll put links down in the description below and over the last few weeks we brought in 850 dump truck loads of clay and the majority of that was used to line the entire pond with a two foot clay blanket and we got all of that wrapped up last week so now we're on to the fun part of the pond build and that's adding all the structure like rocks the oak throne and basically turning this pond into a theme park for fish but before we start adding the structure we have a couple things left on the list one of them is getting the vertical stand pipe installed and the other is hauling the last little bit of dirt that we excavated out and putting it on the back side of the dam so this week the guys brought in this cool tractor that's got three different attachments it's got the grappler the forks and the bucket and the thing i like about it is it's got some speed so he's using that to move the last bit of that dirt and then he's putting the final grade on the dam and it's that four to one slope to make it easier to cut the grass and speaking of that we'll be seeding the entire pond area in this video as well so while we're waiting on the drain pipe to come in it is time to finally set the oak throne that's got to be one of my favorite parts of this whole project the root system out of that 150 year old oak tree is going to live on and continue to provide structure and a good place to hide for thousands of bait fish and when you know it it starts raining right whenever we start moving the oak throne it's kind of like mother nature's way of saying goodbye to the old oak so i'm getting them to place it near the dock and the island and the main reason for that is we're going to run power to it i want to put some underwater lights as well as an underwater camera and i hope to stream that 24 7. we'll talk more about that later and if you can see that white pvc pipe sticking up in the background that's where the dock is going to start and we're probably going to be installing that in the next week or two check it out folks the iron throne is finally in place so we drug it in from over there and it's probably my favorite piece of the whole project the bait fish are gonna absolutely love this thing look at how many places they can get up in there and hide and bass won't be able to touch them so the top of this is going to be about two feet below the surface of the water imagine running a little topwater lure right across the top of this you know there's going to be bait piled in this thing year round and the bass are probably just gonna be patrolling the edge of it because there are a million places for bait to hide so one other thing i got a guy making me some custom signs we're gonna put a sign up out of the top of that that says the oak throne we're gonna do an alcatraz island wooden sign over there one for clyde's cove and probably another one for bonnie's bayou so leave a comment down below if you got an idea for another good wooden song all right the vertical standpipe arrived and this is definitely one of those big milestones in the project because once you install this you can close the valve and that'll seal the pond off and now every time we get some rain it's going to start filling the pond up so the first thing we got to do is get this pipe in place so that he can weld it on so we use a couple different tractors to get everything leveled out and then he starts welding it together all right we just got the vertical drain pipe installed he welded the back of that on and the way this works is the bottom of that has a big plate on it and the bottom is capped off so the water level is going to be set right there at the top of that whenever we have a storm and get a lot of rain it's going to go down through there and through that pipe through the back side of the dam and this portion of it is a valve and that valve is open and closed by that stem right there in the little wheel on top so if i wanted to go up there on the ladder right now and twist that around this valve would rise up and it would open up that pipe so if water came in through the pond it would it could go directly into that pipe and outside the back of the dam now the reason i wanted to go with this type of standpipe is because the exact situation we're in right now we get so many hurricanes and tropical storms just say if we were at full pool and we got a hurricane coming right towards us i could go up there twist that open the valve up and it would drop the water level however much i wanted to so just say if i want to drop it a couple feet down that way when the hurricane came you'd have a couple feet of water that had to rise in the pond before you hit the drain pipe and then after it started flooding to where that 30 inch pipe couldn't handle all the rain then it would go out of our emergency spillway which is down there and when he installed it the last thing he had to do was weld the existing pipe to the vertical pipe did a good job with that so we're all set so we're getting two truckloads of pea gravel delivered and the first one has just arrived and i don't know why but there's something satisfying to me about watching thousands of rocks pile out of a truck but this is really important for the bluegills and the bait fish that are in the pond in order for you to have a successful pond you need those brim and bluegills to spawn each year and reproduce and their favorite thing to make their spawning bed in is a hundred percent pea gravel and sometimes sand so we may mix a little sand in here with the gravel boy the bluegills are gonna be in heaven that is a lot of gravel and we're getting another load of that that's what they're gonna use to spawn in i guarantee you because they did it in my backyard pond all right folks time to do some planting we got our fertilizer five sacks of brown top millet we got some bahia grass but the first thing we're going to plant is alcatraz island and i'm going to go in with bermuda grass because it doesn't grow vertical stems like the bahia grass does and i don't want to be out there cutting it every week but i got just 10 pounds of this because a 50 pound sack of this is 300 bucks because look at how many seeds there are they're tiny so up here getting ready to put the seed out and look at this some animal is already using the island i don't know if that's a squirrel tail or what it kind of looks like something got it because there's hair everywhere but alcatraz island is already being used yeah i'm gonna go ahead and say that squirrel maybe the bobcat got a squirrel or something not sure doesn't look like foxy so we're good i can tell you one thing if you broadcast seed around here you better get it covered up quick because the birds are on attack mode now i picked out two of my favorite pieces that were left from the old oak tree and we're going to put them right here in clyde's cove and if you guys remember when the oak tree was still standing there was a tree stand in it and we would climb up and sit right there on this portion of the oak and you can see that resurrection fern is still alive on oak but look at all of the different patterns that are in this wood some of them are circular patterns that just represent years and years of growth my favorite two pieces that are left are going in clyde's cove and you can't tell by the video but these two pieces were extremely heavy three guys tried to lift them we couldn't even budget so we had to get the tractor over with a chain to get them stood up oh clyde's cove is coming along nicely hopefully he's gonna be as excited as i am about it so the next thing we're gonna do is use the grapple on the tractor and create some big wood piles and so here's my thought process about putting structure in the pond so just being a lifetime fisherman i know that you don't want to have too much structure down on the bottom because it can make it extremely hard to fish but at the same time after talking with these biologists if you don't put enough structure in there to keep all your bait fish protected then the bass are going to go through and literally eat all of the forage in the pond in a short amount of time it's like they could eat it all and get fat really quick but then be starving over the next couple of months so it's very important to put some structure in for the fish to hide so i wanted to do a little experiment with moby you guys have watched him feed in the aquarium dozens of times and normally it takes them you know two to three minutes to go through and eat all of the shiners in the tank sometimes he'll have to bob and weave through the fake structure and you can tell it definitely slows them down sometimes but what i wanted to do is take all of the structure out of the aquarium and see how quickly he ate the shiners and take a look at this guys i think he got him a little bit faster than i was expected with moby's aggression he normally eats fast but i think he set a record pace for eating the shiners in this one that's crazy but it shows you how important the structure is so now i want to talk about the different types of structures so back in my day we would go sink brush piles and tops in different ponds and lakes and you could definitely tell it attracted the fish but as a fisherman there's two different types of structure you could put in one of them is something like a willow tree that has limbs on it that are easily breakable and so if you cast out there and you get hung you just pull really hard and it snaps off the problem with willow trees is they may only last a year to two years before they deteriorate in the water now the other type of structure is something like a hardwood like this oak tree that if you put it down there it's really dense and heavy and it may stay there for 10 years underwater the problem with it is if you get hung up on it you probably lost your crank bait or whatever it is you're using because you're not going to be able to make that heavy piece of wood budge so in this pond i want to do a balance i want to do about 50 percent hardwoods and about 50 percent of the softer wood that's more brushy and i'll attract more bait so i really like what the guys did with one of the first hardwood piles and they made a big circle out of it almost like a bullseye and until this wood gets completely waterlogged it's going to try to float up to the surface so we're using cinder blocks and in the deeper water we're tying it down with a half inch rope and in the shallower water we're going to use metal wire and the reason for that is these brush piles in the deeper water are more for the fish and the thoughts behind this are that the rope will be a lot more likely to snag a treble hook and you'll be losing your bait so we're putting all the rope in the deeper water on the structure that's more designed just for the bait to hide out and in the shallow brush piles that we're going to be fishing a lot by using that metal wire we shouldn't get hung up nearly as much so next up we're going to be spreading that pea gravel and you really just need to spread it in shallow spawning areas for those bluegills that are typically going to be less than five feet deep and we're just going to go through with two to three inch layers on these different spawning flats and one of the main areas i want to do is the shallow end of the island i feel like that'll be a key area where a lot of the bluegills spawn and i'm probably going to put some brush just between the pea gravel beds and the top of the island so when the bluegills spawn all of the baby bluegills can go up there in the brush and survive but i got a few other key places i want to put it one of them is right around clyde's cove and then one of these other shallow road beds that we've got built and then the last thing i'm going to do is save all of the rest of the gravel for the dock area because we're going to build that next week and we're also going to put a bluegill feeder on it so i know we're always going to have a lot of bluegill in that area i think sitting down here in the deep end you can definitely see the depth changes a little bit better but now we're about to work on a couple of new structure projects one of them i call the trough and the other one i call the dugout all right folks just got the trough installed out here now my vision with this is to pile a bunch of brush in there may get one or two of the long oak lambs and put it long ways maybe making like an x or something but i want to put a ton of brush in here and attract a lot of bait and the thing i really liked about this one it still has big enough holes to where the fish can swim through it and get to that bait i'll put cinder blocks around outside of it and it's a good anchor point for a lot of brush piles that's going to bring the bait in and it'll basically be like a shad buffet all right now next project the dugout so you got this entire pond and the only shade since we don't have any trees around it is going to be the pier so i'm going to create an underwater fish dug out to where they can swim up under a platform and get a little shade because this alabama sun is a little hot [Applause] all right we got it complete now we're just gonna anchor the bottom of the post with some cinder blocks i call it the dugout he calls it the shade shack either way it's fine for me that definitely provides them some shade all right he just came up with a better idea rather than tying it off the rope we're just gonna pick the bottom of that post up set it down in the cinder block and fill it with concrete and that should hold it down definitely a better idea going to come back with concrete fill both of those up and then come in with structure but the whole purpose for the dugout right there is creating that shade now one of the last things we're going to do is spread some grass seed and we're going to use the bulldozer tracks to bury the seed just below the surface and hopefully the grass will germinate before we get one of those big tropical storms coming through all right that's a wrap on the circle wood pile i tried to get plenty of brush in there to where the bait could get in there and hide so i was taking a look at our new grass seed on the dam and check this out we had an old tree that had died that just fell over right here on the pond dam you can tell it was dead because it didn't have any leaves on it but you know what we got to do with that now we gotta take that and drag it right off into the pond now let's check out some of the game camera footage because i've noticed some very strange activity going on lately so it's almost like the bucks get really excited when they come around the soybeans and they just start bouncing around and i've heard that coffee was discovered by a goat farmer because whenever the goats would eat the coffee beans they'd get excited and start bouncing and so that led them to looking into a coffee bean but so i don't know why they get so excited about these soybeans but there's definitely something going on here over the past couple of weeks that i can't explain i don't know maybe you guys have seen that in the past and the bobcat coming through to check everything out well as much as i hate to say it it looks like it's all coming to an end they're officially loading up all of the heavy equipment and headed back home these guys are based just outside of montgomery and their company's name is american sports fish hatchery if you guys are looking to build a pond or have your pond stocked with bait or bass give them a call i'll put a link down in the video description they've done an excellent job with building my pond so we still have a couple more structure projects that you'll be seeing next week i still have to get all of the brush and the non-hardwood trees in the pond and put them in places like that trough we also have a big tunnel project you'll see us build in the next video but guys that is going to wrap this one up make sure to hit that subscribe button because we're going to be installing an underground well and putting water in this pond next week but i hope you all enjoyed this video and we will see you all next time [Music]

Channel: BamaBass

Views: 672,358

Rating: 4.9577656 out of 5

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Id: bF-ObQ-tl5k

Length: 14min 48sec (888 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 22 2021