Pond Digging
Every piece of land in this part of the world has what is a real estate agent's idea of a
pond site on it somewhere. It happened that ours was not imaginary. We could see the place
for it, and so could the septic tank permit inspector. So the house is a little farther up
the hill than we first intended.
In September of 1992, after an enormous planning effort (read - years of daydreaming) William rushed out and bought the first backhoe he looked at. Never having been on a backhoe, he had no bad habits to unlearn.And as soon as the pond was finished he would sell it and get his "investment" back. Have the pond dug for sweat equity only. Yeah, sure.
The backhoe arrives to great fanfare. It was here, coming down the drive towards the mobile home, that William discovered that his new toy had no brakes.
Now all we had to do was get a permit from the Army Corps of Engineers for working in a wetland and clear an acre of swamp with hand tools in the winter. The people in the Corps' office in Charleston were as helpful as they could be.
That's the pond site to the left of the bridge. We don't have any pictures of the Corps of Engineers.
Once the site was clear the actual digging was pretty straight forward. It was just dig all the way across, haul off the dirt with the front end loader, and then dig across again, meanwhile keeping the dug out part pumped dry with a little three-horse mudhog.
It only took three years.
There are some more pictures of the construction effort on another page, but here's how it turned out:
