Lake and Pond Construction: Dozer Drivers
Lake and Pond Construction: Pond Builder versus Dozer Driver
We get many calls every year from people who are looking to build a pond, only to balk when I tell them our rates. We stock many new ponds every year that we didn’t build; 95% of said ponds are permanently, severely limited in what can be achieved with their fisheries because they were dug by what I call a dozer driver, meaning someone with no knowledge of fish.
If you were looking for a heart surgeon, you probably wouldn’t even consider hiring someone just on the basis of price; most likely, you wouldn’t even factor cost into the equation. I would hazard a guess that a hundred times out of a hundred you would only look at credentials and ability.
How many people, even when choosing a restaurant to have lunch at, make price the determining factor? If you’re unemployed and about to lose your house, price makes sense as the only variable to consider; in any other scenario, it doesn’t. The cheapest restaurant often will have lesser-quality food than ones that are only marginally more expensive; more than likely, that food will also be decidedly less healthful; it may even be more likely to make you ill.
Having a pond built is a big expense; a pond is a significant investment both in your future enjoyment of your property, and the resale value of the property. A dry hole in the ground adds zero value to a property, and more likely will detract from the total value as an eyesore and a problem to be fixed at large expense; a pond with a world-class fishery, on the other hand, can add zeros on the end of the number that property is worth.
We have a client who has constant, substantial weed problems because his pond was dug by someone who knew nothing about aquatic vegetation; that same pond also had to have Florida bass stocked twice because it’s the wrong depth and they didn’t establish well the first time. Another client has a pond that can’t keep forage in it; it has a different depth problem than the weedy pond, but the same cause, an excavator who knew nothing about fish.
A new customer called us a couple days ago asking if it was a problem if his pond that had been dug by a local excavator was the same depth throughout. I told him it was only a problem if he wanted a good fishery.
You might pay us two or three times what you’d pay a dozer driver to build your pond. Ten years from now when your child or grandchild is catching a ten-pound bass or a two-pound bluegill from that pond, will you miss that money? Because if you save the money, you’re drastically upping the odds that you never catch trophy fish from the pond. If the pond even holds water, which a large percentage of dozer-driver ponds do not.
