need some ideas on how to remove silt from a 10 acre pond that is 80% full to the top the land is flat no wet land around looking for the best way to attack this and what size machine should i use: i have my own ideas but i like to hear others
Is it 80% full of silt, or 80% full of water?
That's a big pond!! A lot depends on your budget. With enough money, almost anything is possible.
Draining/pumping out the water might work best and may be the cheapest option in the long run. Once it is drained, get in there with excavators and vehicles to haul the silt away. If traction is not good, tracked vehicles like Morookas might work for the hauling. However, depending on your soil conditions, the base may never dry well enough to work in.
Another option is to use a dragline or skyline system. The skyline system uses a movable anchor point on the far shore of the pond. With that you could get by without draining the water.
We deepened one end of an existing pond last summer, taking out about 20,000 yards of material. The pond had a blue clay base that never would have dried enough to work in. So we built a dam/causeway across the pond using fill and gravel and then pumped the water from one side of the dam to the other. We then used an excavator to dig with (working from the shore and the causeway) and a 4 yd loader to haul the material away. We could have dug it without pumping the water, but we could do a much neater job if able to see the bottom as we worked. Then we let the water back in and pulled the causeway out.