I spent quite a few hours on the dozer giving our pond the "character" my wife desired.
It still does not have near as much as yours or as much as she would have liked.
Snrub,
There are a few things I would have had done differently had I found this forum sooner!I had four dirt guys give me estimates in December of 2013 and quickly narrowed it down to two.
One guy estimated he could complete the job in 6 days (I had the feeling if the job ran longer I would have to open up my checkbook wide! The second guy wanted to make the pond about 1/3 the present size so he could have a place to put the roots and brush on the backside of the dam and he said his big dozer had not been ran for several months.I passed on these two contractors.
I really liked the next guy.He was very knowledgeable about ponds.He had even worked with the DNR building ponds and habitat.He said that the pond bottom is your main source of structure and was excited about the number of coves and the tapering pond bottom.He said that with the amount of structure built into the pond bottom that I might have issues with an overpopulation of panfish because of their ability to avoid predator fish.He suggested that I have underflow standpipe installed where I could adjust water levels as needed.I wish I would have done this because I feel the positives would outweigh the negatives.The only thing I heard about this guy was he does great work if you can get him to show up( I had a friend that waited over two years for him to show and ended up using someone else). The dirt guy I went with was not the cheapest but give give me a "not to exceed this amount" bid which he pretty much stuck too.
They started on April 15th 2014 with an 84000 pound excavator removing trees and almost buried it.They had muck up to the counterweight and were able to work it out.They contractor had a lot of equipment so they left some here and worked on our pond in between other work.I lost track of man hours but at one time they had two D6 dozers, a scraper, the big excavator and a medium excavator.There were several spots that never quite dried up where they would get stuck giving the pond that desired "pickle barrel" bottom.The pond size kept growing just to find sources of dry dirt.They finished the final grade in May 2015.In hind sight, I would like the pond to be deeper in a few areas and maybe a deep hole next to the beach for diving.Maybe in a few years when time and money allows I will have an excavator come in an deepen a few of the shallow areas to reduce vegetation growth.
All in all we love the pond!!It has made staying around the house so much more enjoying.We have spend countless hours swimming,paddle boating,paddle boarding,and setting around the water cooking on a campfire.We just started fishing a little the last few weeks.
