I had my pond renovation done in August of 2015. There were many trees on the banks all around, down to the water. The pond is probably 60 years old. We cut the dam with an excavator one day and drained it. I pumped out down to the muck with a trash pump, and the dirt guy got his bulldozer in there the next day. He had an excavator and a medium bulldozer. He started at a corner, pushing the muck across a short chord into a hole prepared by the excavator in one corner. As the dozer worked back and forth filling the hole, the excavator would throw the muck over the dam. By working the pond the way they did, the dozer would always have undisturbed clay under the muck for traction. It took them three days to clean out and deepen my 1/4 acre pond. The bulldozer had to periodically stop cleaning the pond and push the muck pile away from the excavator.

We made a big mistake by not completely removing all the tree roots from the dam (only removed root balls with a bulldozer), and the pond leaks about an inch or so a day when near full, and stops when it gets below the roots (about 30 inches).

In hindsight, I would have been better off filling in the pond with the trees and dirt from the dam, making it part of the hayfield, and building a new pond nearby. We had to wait a year for the ugly sludge pile to dry, then paid to have it spread around.

I don't think I would renovate a pond with that many problems ever again if there was room to build another one.