A good rule of thumb when deciding on how to manage ponds is to think what might happen naturally – and therefore what plants and animals might be used to.
So imagine wild cattle, or bison, or woolly mammoths, or rhino’s or horses some time in the distant past crunching their way to the edge of a frozen pond – and their hooves going through the ice.
Well, probably if you do something similar it won’t do too much harm.
So this means the manwith the axe (you can see full thing here) is probably going a bit over the top, never mind the how this plays with Health & Safety.
Imagine the scene: it’s a two-hander, you and the Health and Safety Officer:
You: ‘Well, the activity is swimming and its going to be cold, possibly frozen; so we’ll be using axes to break the ice’
Safety Officer: ‘And, errr, what kind of protective clothing do you have’
You: ‘Well, umm, we were kind of thinking really, you know, no clothing – well except swimming trunks of course – because its, like, well, err, swimming’.
Safety Officer: ‘Naked? Axes?…..’
