My five fish increased to fifty over the next couple of years. I then discovered the local Koi club, saw what other people’s ponds looked like, and I was off again! My 4000 Gal pond built entirely from Lowe’s just wasn't going to be good enough. I did some homework over the next few months, and started the planning for the next pond. At this point, I feel the need to point out I am not a wealthy doctor, as if you haven’t already noticed. The planning was the easy part. When I told my wife about my plan she was not quite as thrilled as I was.

What I wanted was a 6000 Gal pond; lined of course, we could never afford concrete. So I went to Lowes, and bought two good sharp shovels. I figured that when one shovel got tired I would grab the other one, and I would have the hole dug in no time! Well, you know that didn’t last long. My neighbor had a friend that had a backhoe. Wilber said he would dig the hole for $200. I couldn’t beat that, so off we went. We finished digging the hole. It was just a little bigger than I had expected, but that was ok, right?

Then I had to find all the other parts I needed. Over the next few weeks while the hole sat there, I ran into some good fortune with a couple of really great jobs. I thought, maybe concrete was within our grasp. So, I needed to look into that. I found some #7 rebar at the local scrap yard going very cheap. Folks, #7 rebar is big, really big, but it was cheap. Then a local concrete company was going out of business, so I got the blocks for the walls at half price. I thought things were going my way.

So, concrete it would be. Now, that meant I needed to change some of the plans. The first thing I realized was, I could have jets!! I needed a plant bed for my wife; and I could also have waterfalls. The question was how could I do all of that? The most energy efficient way is to make it gravity fed, like the old pond. If I could lift the water just enough to get it to flow back to where it needed to go. I think I’ll tell you about the pond, and then tell you how I did it. You can see from the pictures where the plant bed is. The basic pond is a circle 25 feet across. The main pond walls are 68" tall, the water is about 54"deep. The floors of the pond and plant bed are around 14" thick; there are six fish eye jets, and two 4" bottom drains. The jets make the water counter rotate around the bottom drains. It also has two Savio mini skimmers and five waterfalls. The entire system contains 17,000 Gal.

The bottom drains feed into two 2500Gal settling chambers. They are actually fiberglass radar domes that I obtained from a friend. The water comes in at mid level and is pumped out at the top, making a kind of vortex. Then the water is sent through two 40 watt, Emperor UV lights to the filter, a smaller radar dome. It also comes in the side and rotates around. The skimmers are fed straight into the filter. Now the filter is a dome that is about 4’ across and 5’ deep. There are 54 cubic feet of media in it. To save money, we used clothes-hanger size markers. They are approximately the same size as Kaldness media with the same buoyancy. The three pumps push the water around and there are four- 4" air stones in the bottom that lift the media up, keeping it fluid. The air stones are driven by Sweet Water SL94 air pumps. Then the water is gravity fed back to the pond by two 6" pvc lines. The water for the jets comes from a mid-level intake between the skimmers and is pumped to a 1.1 Aqua Dyne bead filter, It then goes to the six jets that can be adjusted to however I like.

All the pumps are Dolphins. A 2700 Super Amp Master pump drives the jets. There are two 3600 Super Amp Master pumps that pull from the two bottom drains. A 4000 Super Amp Master pulls from the two skimmers. I have a large swimming pool pump as my utility pump. I have it plumbed so I can pull or push water from or to the bottom drains on either of the two Vortexes. I can also do the same with the bottom drain on the filter or the plant bed, one at the time or all at the same time. This is useful when treating the pond and by-passing the filter. However, the main purpose of the swimming pool pump is to clean the filter and the vortexes. I just pump the bad water into the yard and refill the pond with clean water, thus doing a water change each week.

The only thing I haven’t described, was the plumbing. What a nightmare! I don’t think I need to go into details, trust me! I don’t want to be reminded of all of that over again. I’ll just say this, there are 225 feet of 1 1/2" PVC, close to 300 feet of 2" PVC, 160 feet of 4" PVC and 120 feet of 6"PVC. That’s a lot of plumbing!

All of this sounds really expensive, but when you do most of the work yourself, and stretch it out over six months, it doesn’t seem so bad. Not that it was cheap; it just didn’t seem so bad.

I wanted a pond that would be predator proof. We live on the marsh and predators are really a problem. This is why the edge of the pond is 16’’ higher than the water. Most creatures will not enter a pond if they cannot get out and we all know that the Great Blue Heron cannot reach down 16’’ to catch fish. The only other predator that we needed to concern ourselves with, since we live on the coast, was the Osprey. The pond is large enough that he could easily swoop in and carry off one of our fish. The solution for that problem was to put up four columns. My wife, Linda, made three large sails to hang from the columns. One was a rectangular 10’by 20’ and the other two were triangular 26’ by 16’. The sails would deter the osprey from swooping into the pond and feasting on our fish. It also gave shade to our pond.

Now for the people I need to give credit to: my wife for putting up with me the whole time I was doing this. My friend, Rod, was there for the hard stuff and Wilber, was the man with the backhoe. Hurman is a good friend and co-worker who did the block work and concrete. Dan, ‘The Man’, gave me the tanks for the filters. Of course, Johnna was there every time she could get off work. Some of you will know her from some of the message boards. Thanks to all my good friends, I have a pond to be proud of.

Thanks y’all, Robert.