Building a 5 Acre Pond! (The Final Chapter)

folks at home welcome back to the five acre pond build and if you missed the first videos in this series i'll put a link down in the description below but one of the last things left to do before we fill the pond up with water is build a dock but if you guys remember a few weeks ago we got our pond builder to dig out a section of the pond that was four feet deep so we could add an additional four feet of clay and the sole reason for that is whenever we sunk the post for the dock we didn't want it to punch through the clay liner now back then it was pretty easy to spot but after we filled the pond with clay and then a few hundred trucks drove over it it wasn't quite so easy to remember exactly where we dug out but fortunately we dug out a few test holes and we were still in the clay so we were good to go so the dock builder started setting the outside post and and basically we're just building a 20 by 20 dock and it's going to have about a 16 foot long walkway leading up to it and my goal is to have it about a foot and a half to two feet above the water level but unfortunately the dock building got cut short today because we got heavy rains from another hurricane coming through so now it's a good time to go check in on our new pet ducks so in last week's video we got this custom duck house built and we want the ducks to spend most of their time in the pond but we needed something that was predator proof and liz and sarah did a good job of getting all their food and water set up so now it's time to release the ducks in their new home good job all right so now we can finally introduce you to the two newest pets of the pond you can see this is the boy duck he's got a little bit of green on his head they're not quite a year old yet so their colors are gonna change a little bit and this is our female duck and this is the first time we've owned ducks and i can honestly say i underestimated how much they like water they spend the majority of their day bathing and playing in the water and it's really funny because their personalities are starting to show a lot and the female duck is a mess she can literally make a mess quick but we knew when we got the ducks that there were predators around and that's one of the reasons we got them this duck house because we felt like it would keep them safe so let's see what happens their first night on the farm [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] so thankfully they made it through their first night they had some raccoons and an owl stopped by but luckily nothing tried to get into their pen and honestly i think that the raccoons may have so much to eat out here with all the peanuts and everything else that they may not ever mess with the ducks because you could tell how big they were they were some thick boys so i don't think food source is a problem for them and hopefully it'll keep them from ever trying to get into the pen so they survived the night but the next thing they have to survive today is hurricane nicholas and it's one of those crazy things that we're in south alabama and hurricane nicholas made landfall in texas but we're still going to get a bunch of rain and some high winds over the next couple of days but i think those ducks are going to be fine let's check out the pond so for those of you ready to see the pond fill up we're going to get a lot closer over the next couple of days hurricane ida came just a few days after we completed the pond build but somehow we stayed right in between the major bands of rain we had one just to the east and one just to the west of us looking at the radar we're gonna get a lot more rain from hurricane nicholas and speaking of hurricanes this is the one year anniversary of hurricane sally and we were directly in sally's path and got a lot of damage that was the one that knocked the big 150 year old oak tree down and so i thought it'd be interesting to look back at what the farm looked like one year ago today the farmers were just getting ready to flip the peanuts over and you know when they do that animals like foxy are going to stock up for the winter all right folks we have some pretty bad erosion here i'm fixing to show you we left all this up all these straw wattles and silt fencing from the last hurricane that came through but this is number two we got a lot of rain and the one good thing about it is we got a lot of water from that last hurricane even though it didn't really come right at us we got a lot of waterfall from it but this is what happens when water comes in to the pond too fast look at that probably a two and a half to three foot cave that went completely through the clay blanket you can see there's the clay right there there's a good shot at it all that red on the bottom that's our natural sand and then that's all the clay layer so if it was to fill completely up right now we'd have a hole in the pond you could see back there really bad erosion so i know a lot of you guys want to see this pond full asap but this is one of the reasons why you don't want those heavy rains to come in all of that watershed comes hits that hill and then all comes in right here so gotta do a little bit of work on this fencing because we're early in hurricane season and we could have a couple more look at how bad it washed under those you can see i tried to plant that small millet that was my original planting and then after that last hurricane we came back in and tried to plant some and i'm sure that that helped because that has a lot of root systems down in there but it just wasn't quite tall enough all right here's a quick walk through on the pond after all the hurricane rains you can definitely tell we got a lot of water this whole area was dry last week you can see the tunnels back there that's one of the best gauges it's up over the second layer of tunnels right now we got that decoy hanging out back there too you can see we finally got some green grass on alcatraz island that's good news and here's a look at where he ended up with a pier he wanted to get a lot further this week but with all that rain it shut him down he got six of those posts in the ground and that's not how high they're going to be he's going to go through and cut them off once we set where that water line is going to be we're going to try to go about a foot and a half to two feet above the water line but here's a lot better look from up here on the island i'd say we're about four feet deep out there in the deepest part of the pond you can see this road bed right here is almost covered next up will be that road bed right there and then once it gets covered up all that water is going to fill in this whole entire shallow portion of the pond so we definitely got to get that dock knocked out pretty quick you can see though some of this brown top millet came up really quick and then that's that bermuda grass that we planted a few weeks ago it's finally starting to pop up let's talk for just a second about that overflow pipe so there was a couple of things i wanted to do before it filled completely up but after talking to one of the pond guys i changed my mind so one of them has put a cover over the top of the pipe and i actually went out and found a good solution for that it's called a trash rack and it actually extends out even further than the pipe to keep that debris off of the pipe so if any logs were going to float in they would actually have to go underwater to get sucked into the pipe and then the other thing was down at the very bottom of that pipe there's an open drain valve so if we ever wanted to twist that wheel there at the top of the pipe it would open up the drain valve on the bottom and let all this water out of the pond but the guy that built the pond said what they do on their ponds is once they open it they just get this long metal rod with a screen on the end of it and they lower it down and they cover up the exit valve right whenever they open it up and that keeps all the fish from coming out but he said bass and bluegill will really they'll swim away from it but grass carp are really the only things that'll typically get sucked through it now this area did really good with the erosion i was hoping the other area would do kind of like this but you can see that fence is really trenched in really good and the hay has kept all the erosion in check for the most part you had a little bit that came in through there but you can see not nearly as bad as the other spot yeah they were hungry weren't they they just had to survive probably one of their first hurricane rains and now they're hungry now let's check in on the ducks again and in the last video i asked you guys to help us name our two pet ducks and i was planning on announcing the winner of that today but i wanted to watch them and see what their personality was like so you still have one more chance if you want to leave a comment down below on what you think we should name the two pet ducks i'll be announcing the winner in next week's video and we had several people comment and say that we may want to leave the ducks in the pen for the first couple of weeks one so they know they always have food and water there and then the other hopefully they're going to know that they have protection here and they can come in at night so that's the plan we're going to leave them in the pen for a couple of weeks let the doc builder get done because i know once he's out there with a hammer and making a lot of sounds they probably wouldn't hang around the pond but we had some predators come back again last night and so far the owl seems like the one that's most interested the raccoons never came back around but check out the owl so i've never personally got to watch an owl hunt but i think he knew immediately that he wasn't going to be able to get inside their cage so watch him use the polaris as a shield and it's kind of like he's waiting on the ducks to come out of the cage and then he's going to attack and i think after a while he realizes that's not going to be successful so he hops up on top of the polaris and that didn't work out for him either so he moved over to the top of their pen and i believe this one is a different owl you can tell he's definitely bigger than the other one that is one giant owl folks so you can see the ducks inside of that little wired window at the bottom of the pen and it looks to me like the owl is twice the size of the ducks i'm sure it sucks for the ducks having to watch a predator sit right on the other side of a cage but at least they're safe and yep this video confirms that there are two owls in this area and one of them is a lot bigger than the other and a couple of deer coming through grazing on some peanuts look at this poor guy he can't get any sleep at night because all the house and he's falling asleep in his water bucket it's a tough life for some ducks so i tried moving the two hay wattles i had right here not much is helping it is backing the water up a little bit but still flowing down through there i'm thinking one of the only things i can do is maybe put some cinder blocks or something in there for it to crash off into and stop the erosion a little bit but gonna get this fixed up as soon as it stops raining now let's go on a flight with the drone to see how much water was added to the pond and speaking of drones one of the last projects that i have is we're going to use the drone to create a 3d model of the pond and it'll kind of be like a topo map of the pond and then use a cnc machine to carve out a wooden table so i'll have an exact replica of the pond and i'll be able to pinpoint where all the structure piles were at even after the pond fills with water so i got started on that project this week i'm using a software called drone deploy and it's pretty cool you basically map out your pond location and then it sets a flight path and will actually take control of your drone and fly it for you and rather than using video for the 3d model it goes through and takes pictures and then it overlaps all the pictures and creates the 3d model so we'll be doing several flights to try to get all the resolution we can and then we're going to take those files and build the table out of it so that is one reason i'm happy that the hurricanes didn't fill the pond up it gave me just enough time to get that model created now let's look at some of the game camera footage and this one's going to be selfie themed these are all the deer that came right up to the camera to take a selfie now it's time to feed mr moby so [Music] and two out of our last three videos made it on youtube's trending list and that's the first time that's ever happened on this channel so i just wanted to say thanks to you all who have been following along with this pond build and we really do appreciate all the support but that is going to wrap up this video make sure to hit that subscribe button because the pond is going to be full soon hope you all enjoyed this one and we will see you all next time [Music] you

Channel: BamaBass

Views: 583,148

Rating: 4.9394927 out of 5

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Id: hqhBLwQUb-8

Length: 14min 23sec (863 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 19 2021