No More Leak

Yes, it appears to be fixed. Sadly, the solution involved no midnight elephants or spacetime rifts.

The flexible pipe between the pump and waterfall had an intermittent leak. Why intermittent? I don’t know. I dug it up and watched a few weeks and found no damp ground. But then it sprayed me when it flexed as I repositioned it. Maybe it varied with the sprinkler schedule, leaking less into saturated soil, or temperature, expanding and contracting — one of the world’s great mysteries.

In the course of finding the leak, I’ve rebuilt the waterfall, taken apart and re-sealed the pump housing, completely drained the water to clean and check the liner for punctures, removed all landscaping to clean and re-level the liner edge, and removed watercourse rocks to re-seal a seam there. The last two I actually did twice.

… which is all to say that pond ownership may require a love of puzzles, digging and futility.

It will be another season or two before plants fill in everywhere I had to dig.

Some remember we once had larger fish, a foot or more in length. That was before the Dark Ages, when aquatic life was beset with such pestilence as grade school boys, a hard freeze, a faulty pump and, of course, The Leak.

This is the new generation, spawned of The Enlightenment.