The pond went down fourteen inches in August

I measure the pond off the same post I have measured it off since the first year I kept the log. The post is the old gate post on the south bank, the one that never got pulled when the gate moved. There are notches on it, one for every foot, and between the notches I read the inches with a folding rule. First day of the month and last day of the month, morning, before the wind gets up. That is the whole method. It takes four minutes and it has never failed me yet.

August took fourteen inches off the pond. That is the worst single month since the summer the spillway was rebuilt, and it happened without a hot spell anybody would call a record. It was just dry. The gauge caught one and nine-tenths inches the whole month, most of it from one storm that ran off the road ditch and did the pond no good at all.

What I noticed first was the mud flat on the north end. By the middle of the month it was cracked open in plates the size of a mailbox, and the cracks took in the whole heel of my boot. The herons worked the edges of it every morning. When the water stands off that far from the bank, the fish get penned in the deeper hole by the dam, and I do not like how that sets up going into a dry fall.

The stock pipe is the part that actually matters. It runs off the low point at the dam, and its mouth stands about three feet above the bottom, so the stock get clean water off the top and the muck stays put. All through August I checked the flow every second day. It ran clear and it ran steady, a little under what I would call full but never less than the stock needed. The float valve in the tank house did its job. I greased the linkage on the fifteenth and wrote that down too.

September has been a different story. The rain came back the last week, three and eight-tenths inches in nine days, and the pond has climbed a foot and a half off the bottom of the hole. It is not full and it will not be full by freeze-up unless October repeats September. But the mud flat is under water again and the herons have moved on to the creek.

Two things I am carrying forward into the next notebook. First, the pipe needs its winter work done early this year, before the ground takes the frost, because a dry pond freezes harder at the mouth and I do not want to be out there with a torch in December. The step list for that job is written up in the guides. Second, I want a second measuring point. One post is fine until the day something happens to the post, and then the whole series is broken. I will notch the spillway wall this winter and start reading both, so the record survives a bad day with the tractor.

The numbers below are exactly as they stand in the notebook, month by month. Level is feet under the spillway, which is how I have always kept it, so a smaller number is a fuller pond.

Entered the same day.