After spending all of yesterday's daylight and about 10 hours of today's daylight working, I believe I have gotten the pond leak fixed. I rented a mini excavator, along with a gas powered tamp. I dug from the point where the leak was going into the dam, 3 feet lower, and about 3 feet each way of the point where it started to leak. Then backfilled while moistening the soil with a garden hose. We basically ran the tamp non-stop while sprinkling dirt in there. We pulled some trees out along with most of the roots. We pulled the old culvert out and made a nice tamped bed for it to lay on and packed dirt all around it. We worked our booties off.

Point being, all I gotta do now is get some kind of erosion control system in place and wait for rain.