For depth, what we ended up doing is once the water got too deep in the current dig area, we left a dam of dirt and moved over further and started digging until the previous dam gave way, and then started over. That's why you see all the high lines of sand in the construction picture. Hopefully that will work out to nice bottom contours for the fish. Maybe it will all level off over time on the bottom, not sure.
Yes, we hauled every yard of dirt to the north end of the pond and dumped it in piles as you can see in the attached picture. Hard to believe all those little ice cream scoops of sand are from an 18 yard dump truck!
I estimated the current surface area with my drone and it was 8/10 of an acre. And yes I'm hoping from here on out the projects will be less stressful. We could have made a reality show during digging!
FYI for anyone's reference, by the time we rented the excavator and truck (extra fee for 18 hours over 40 on rentals), diesel fuel, water pump fuel, required insurance, and paying my buddy to run the excavator, we've got about $17k into the 8/10 acre pond. Still cheaper than the $30k I was quoted for 1 acre, but a lot of work mostly entirely due to all the WATER. If we had been prepared with a 6" or 12" trash pump to keep the water low, things probably would've gone a LOT better. Smaller overall cost, larger pond.
