Great thoughts. Thank you. Finally had the local excavator who has worked on this pond before and extensively on my property over the years make time to come up.

Super nice guy; just tremendously busy on commercial jobs. Had a landscaper friend of mine kick his butt a bit to get up here.

This guy has a stellar reputation for the job he gets done and the price he charges.

His view was that we really wont' be able to get this pumped down to the point we can get equipment in it. He said it is all gravel and there is water around everywhere. I will spend a lot of money pumping.

His suggestion was to use the excavator from shore to clean all the way around the pond. Something we came up with on his suggestion was for me to rent a long reach excavator ($5k for one week) and he would operate it for $30 per hour which I think is quite fair and that gives us a 60' boom to work with rather than the normal 20' or so. That will put me in $10k for a week with fuel, machine and his time and this guy is a great operator. He says it won't take a week to clean it out so we can extend the pond in whatever time we have left.

So that is what we are going to do. I trust his judgement as he knows this area very well. That said, I'm going to try to get this sucker pumped out at least to the point where I can keep up with the water coming in before he gets here which will at least be another month. He would really prefer to do it in the winter when the ground is harder. Easier to work on he says.

Hell he gave me a total quote of $10k if we used his normal excavator to do both my pond, regrade my driveway and get recycled asphalt on with a steam roller - only $3500-4k was the pond. I will get the long boom excavator though. I'm only going to do this once in 20 years so might as well go all in. Still $10 k cheaper than the other quite although I'm confident that their work would really be stellar.

I don't have electric there but I am planning to put it out for my aeration system. Maybe I should get that done first so that I can put a sump pump in it. Renting a 3" pump is like $1k per month!!