Okay, so here's the scenario. I have a 53 acre private lake loaded with stumps and I mean you hit one every 5 feet kind of stumps. It was created by the previous owners who built a dam and connected two natural sloughs to make the larger lake. They did cut down trees to make a channel through the lake, but the story goes that when they flooded it, they all floated back into the channel. There is no clear path to get from one end of the lake to the other without playing plinko with the boat. We just run smaller aluminum jon boats and a pontoon and do fine, you just can't go very fast and you're constantly pushing off of stumps just under the surface. I mean you can't even run fast with electric (that is all we have on the jon boats). We keep large bamboo push poles in all the boats to get unstuck. Sometimes it works in our favor to get stuck on a stump if it keeps us in good position on a hot fishing spot in the wind, but still need to move around in general without bumping non-stop. This is mostly Cypress stumps.
I would like to cut a new channel that goes from one end of the lake to the other and I just don't know if there's any equipment out there that would make it easy. I know there are underwater chainsaws, but I'm not interested in diving in these snake infested waters for long periods of time. The depth ranges down to about 14ft max for the entire lake with much of it closer to 4-8 foot where I would want the channel. Has anyone ever seen any type of equipment mounted to a specialized boat that would cut a path through stumps underwater? I just need to know if this even exists. I know it would be a long shot to have one near me available for hire, just need to know if there is a way to do this with boat-mounted equipment and not by hand with a chainsaw.
P.S. I'm talking doing this without draining the lake. I don't want to start over on the fish population, which is decent right now. I don't want to cause a fish kill by taking it down too far either.
