To answer your questions: no, we are not going to drain the pond completely. The guy who is working on digging it out right now is lowering the pond 2 feet by pumping water out into a larger body of water that our pond drains into. They are doing the digging/excavating two ways, they have a large backhoe working from shore and they also have a barge on the pond with a backhoe which is dredging as well.

We'd like to be able to have some bass in the 3-4 pound range. I figured to get bass larger than that it would take alot of time and we'd have fewer bass as well.

Esshup, you came up and visited our pond late last summer. This is the pond you went to in watervliet, MI. Right now they are scraping out all the cattails and making the pond much deeper. I'll need to call you in a month or so to figure what chemicals to dump in there in the spring to keep the lilly pads out.