Thanks for the advice esshup.
I was afraid I was going to have to add an excavator to the project budget, and your thinking seems to confirm that!
"Be careful with the dozer in there on the clay. If it starts to slip, don't dig yourself deeper, it will be $$$ to pull it out......"
That is why I wanted to strip the "overburden" first. I need to make it as difficult as possible to get stuck on this pond and I didn't want to be coming out of any deep holes with the dozer. Lately, I have had whatever is the opposite of the "Midas Touch".
The good excavator guys on the forum have posted about excavating massive yards of fill in short periods of time. I don't know how they do it, because in most cases the project dimensions are much larger than their bucket radius.
Is your idea to dig the deepest parts of the pond with the excavator and spoil it in the most optimum spots on the virgin ground towards the pond perimeter? The spoils are then moved later with the dozer? That sounds pretty efficient to me.
