We just cleaned a pond three weeks ago and there was absolutely no water in it all year due to the drought that area had this year. There must have been about 10 feet of good black dirt in it, then pure clay muck under that. The first 3-4 feet we used the scrapers to self load, after that we loaded it all with an excavator, the sides were too steep to pull the loaded scraper out with a 350 hp front wheel assist attempting to pull a 8 yard scraper. But the upside was, the black dirt was dry, I couldn't believe it, no slop, no muck, no wet spots, nothing till we hit the clay layer, that was bottomless to say the least. I tried to tell the farmer to keep going and do the whole pond because it would probably never be that good of conditions ever again within his lifetime to get it done, but he had enough dirt for his building project that he needed so we ended up quitting and just leaving the rest in the pond. Not sure but I'd guess maybe a few thousand more scraper loads and we'd have had it cleaned out and back to full water capacity again. We attempted this pond cleaning a few years ago and gave it up, nobody could even get close to the pond with an empty scraper before they got stuck.............then to this fall where they self loaded the first few feet out of the pond??
Quite the fall, in the morning we'd work in water and slop, winching the trencher through putting in tile till the lines we put in were so overloaded and beyond full capacity and had to quit to let the lines catch up and drain down, then in the afternoon we'd go clean ponds that were dusty dry and if the wind got too bad we'd have to quit because stirring up the dirt while loading it caused so much dust, nobody could see and in the valley we were working in the dust just hung and swirled around so badly after about four hours or so, even with lights on, the tractor drivers couldn't see to avoid each other, truly unbelievable the diverse conditions less than 20 miles apart.