I'm no different to any who are totally Koi Kichy and not long after it's completion my mind started wandering. We had an area to the right of the pond that if we planted out any plants of more then a few inches would obscure our view of the pond from our lounge picture window. So after a little chat with Lynn it was decided that the pond would be enlarged to encompass this area.

In the photo below it can be seen where I had removed soil from the enlargement area and had started removing rock, while the pond was still up and running. Photo taken summer 2001.

In October 2001 the pond was taken out of commission and the real work started in earnest!  A friend of mine has a mini digger and prices per day were worked out, he also hired a mini dumper to remove the spoil to my back drive, where he would later collect the rock spoil for dumping.

Unfortunately once the digger had removed the  area of rock that was in the area where the pond was being enlarged the digger was not man enough to break the rock from the floor, so I had to break it out little at a time with the Kango and then the machine would remove the rock to the dumper.

Click on the thumbnails below for a larger photo.

Over the coarse of two weekends we had managed to remove the rock to a depth of 5'. The rock pile on my back drive had grown huge and the Saturday following Stuart the digger driver spent loading a 20 ton tripping trailer pulled by a 4 wheel drive tractor. Stuart drove the tractor with load 4 miles to a farm on moorland, where the rock was used for farm tracks. It took 8 full loads. Below is a photo taken after about half the spoil had been removed. The pile was stacked 8' tall!

Only a small amount of work was carried out during summer of 2002 as the noise from the Kango is quite loud and did not want to upset the neighbors to much.

This pond was going to be 6' deep come hell or high water, so it was back on my own with the Kango to remove the last foot, plus benching, plus pipe runs. I had been working evening and weekends for a couple of weeks when I decided that a roof was going to be a must, as It would take me at least the whole of the winter to remove the rock down to the given depth. So the next weekend was spent building the roof. On top of the timbers I nailed plastic mesh, over that I laid polythene and capped that off with another layer of plastic mesh, with hope that this would make it strong enough to last the winter. This was built in November 2002

It was not quite long enough to cover the full length of the pond as the longest timbers I could buy were just over 6mtr, but once the polythene was on the gaps could be filled.