When the summer Zamboni moves through, you can still shoot and score.
Many lakes suffer from nitrogen leached from fertilized lawns, which results in overgrown aquatic vegetation. Bloated weedbeds then become the victims of various companies that get hired to control them by all but complete eradication. The standard means? Weed harvesters. Whether or not a weed harvester serves that objective more effectively than chemical treatment, it does serve as an alternative that I believe is better for lake environments.
My son and I used to fish a lake with crystal-clear water. After it was chemically treated, we noticed bits of aquatic vegetation contributing to the water’s turbidity. A weed harvester doesn’t dissolve weeds, but it does reduce the biomass as weeds clarify water by filtering out excess nutrients and pollutants. Harvesters work against that ecological factor but not in the way chemicals do. Most of the machines have a waterwheel that collects Eurasian milfoil and other aquatic vegetation, a trained technician or two overseeing the rolling up of the weeds from the lake into a boat’s container space. The take is hauled away from the premises by truck.
Fish don’t get injured, but what fish wouldn’t bolt as a loud machine under power approaches? It makes a difference that the harvesting isn’t done in a day. Persistence over days at a time and possibly longer means fish may only take so much bullying before migrating to areas of a lake distant from the commotion.
My buddy Brian Cronk and I have fished for years a lake affected in recent times by harvesting. Recreational use of any kind of motor is prohibited there. Row, paddle, or peddle, no hurry needed. The community has a conscience when it comes to keeping the lake healthy, but people may not be perfectly informed.
Brian had told me about weed harvesting going on during the single year I didn’t get out on the lake. And then one morning last year we found many acres weedless, which led us to suspect more harvesting going on. We fished the barren areas, because in the past, we’ve done very well there. Catching one bass only served to tempt us to waste more time, though we had the good sense to continue meandering towards the back of the lake.
There we found abundant milfoil; saw it rising nearly to the surface in billowing clumps, but it wasn’t really too thick. Obviously, the lower lake had been harvested, and up above, the weedbeds hadn’t been touched. Or not yet.
Sunlight came and went behind clouds. Wind allowed us to drift from one side of the lake to the other. We drifted and paddled back. Pickerel and bass of 2 and over 3 pounds hit chatterbaits, surface plugs, Yum Dingers and Senkos on every drift.
The difference between fishing the lower and upper lake felt dramatic. Brian couldn’t get over it. I still remember the sight of the milfoil because I admired it so keenly as the realized symbol of my hope for a good catch. Neither Brian, nor myself, could tell for absolute certainty if fish had moved from the lower lake into these weeds, but how else explain the dearth of any catches, where in the past we had done so well? One of the spots the harvester had cleared out was only about a hundred yards distant from milfoil beds we fished. Fish after fish coming from that milfoil strengthened our overwhelming belief that they had migrated up lake.
To me, the interesting question is whether the fish migrated into the milfoil purely because of its forage-attracting quality and value as cover, or because they fled the harvester, making their way up lake as the eventuality of getting pushed in that direction while the harvester made its way up lake, too. Probably both motives resulted in the fish being available to us. No doubt the milfoil was attractive. But the harvester is a menacing machine that spooks fish into moving ahead of it. Its persistent commotion while it destroyed habitat must have driven them into the lake’s upper reaches.
As Brian and I rode away from the lake after the outing’s end, the weed harvester and boat on a trailer behind a pickup passed us on the other side of the road.
