How deep do I have to go?

Nothing changes the look, or smell, of a beautiful morning on Ottertail Lake then a floating dead fish. One of the more grunt like jobs a resort owner has is to clean up the shore of these odoriferous creatures. It doesn't end there, we still have to pick it up, carry it in the net, cross the street, dig a hole and bury it. On top of the daily burial of the floating fish is the constant buckets of cleaned fish from the fisherman that also require ceremonious departures.

A substantial sized hole must be created to receive the daily fish deposit. The depth of the hole varies by the skill of the digger, but the digger is required to dig a hole that is a minimum of 2 feet deep by 3 feet wide. A seasoned digger can eyeball these dimensions, but there's always a novice that wants to get involved. The size of the fish inevitably causes the hole to be of varying sizes and the handle of the shovel is always a helpful measuring tool.

To give an example, a fish washed up on shore. It was a sturgeon and the biggest I had ever seen. After wrangling it into the net, which took two people, we drug it across the street to give it a fishy funeral. A typical two foot by three foot hole would not suffice and we quickly had to change our tactics. The sturgeon was four and a half feet long, and about six inches wide. We needed a grave to fit the monster, and to determine the size of the grave, we did some quick math. To fit a fish that massive we needed a grave five feet long, 1 foot wide, and three feet deep. After painstakingly shoveling a hole that removed fifteen cubic feet of earth, we had the final resting place of the mammoth fish.