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Messalonskee Lake Association Hires Help to Combat Milfoil

September 18, 2010 - OAKLAND -- Since Monday, Steve Church has spent six hours a day submerged in Messalonskee Lake, plucking milfoil plants that are sucked up by a vacuum and spewed onto the deck of the Limwater.

With a rake, Dave Sanfason, the boat's captain, tosses tangled bunches of the invasive plant into a metal basket that will be hauled off to the Oakland Transfer Station on a backhoe.

The Messalonskee Lake Association hired Church and Sanfason to spend a week picking milfoil from some the most heavily infested and high-traffic areas of the lake.

Mike Willey, the association's president, said milfoil can't be eradicated, but it can be controlled. The use of Church, Sanfason and the Limwater is one of the mitigation efforts that began this year and will continue annually, Willey said.

"We monitored it for a long time to figure out how bad it was," he said. "This is the first year we've done a significant amount of work."

Willey said there's been milfoil in Messalonskee Lake for about 20 years. If it's not controlled, the plant will continue to spread and impede recreational uses of the lake.

"You can't boat in it, you can't swim in it, you can't use the lake for what we use it for," he said.

The Limwater is a diver-assisted suction harvester -- the second such boat built by the Lake Arrowhead Conservation Council, based in Waterboro.

Captains and divers have been using the two boats on that lake, which has a more severe milfoil problem than Messalonskee, throughout the summer. That work wrapped up last week, so the conservation council lent the boat to the lake association for a $5,000 fee.

Church, an experienced commercial diver and underwater welder, pulled up enough milfoil to fill the basket once by the end of the day Tuesday. Sanfason said he wasn't sure how much milfoil the basket holds, but that it's about the same as 150 onion bags.

For the first half of the week, Church and Sanfason worked by the public boat launch in Oakland. Willey said it was an important place to control milfoil because of the amount of boats that pass through there. When the boats drive through the milfoil, they break the plant and drag pieces to different parts of the lake, spreading the infestation.

That's probably how variable-leaf milfoil, which is native to Florida, ended up in many of Maine's lakes -- carried up on boats that are used in both states.

Earlier this summer, the lake association hired a professor from the University of Maine at Farmington to draw a map of Messalonskee Lake, showing the places where the problem was worst.

"He found a fairly big bloom right in here," Willey said about the area around the boat launch.

A $13,500 grant from the U.S. Department of Fish & Wildlife, along with private donations, funded the map work and will cover the cost of using the Limwater.

It also paid for barriers that were installed in August to create channels, clear of milfoil, so that boats could travel more easily.

Willey said he believes Messalonskee is the only one of the Belgrade Lakes that has a significant milfoil problem; but, according to Sanfason, who's watched the plant spread through the chain of lakes by the Little Ossipee River in southern Maine, that won't be the situation for long.

"Once it's in the watershed, it's in the watershed," Sanfason said. "If they don't have it now, they'll have it later."

by Leslie Bridgers, Kennebec Journal, September 18, 2010

Lakes: Messalonskee Lake
Regions: Belgrade


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