By Colin Holme

Special to the News

On Friday, June 12, one of our courtesy boat inspectors pulled a plant off a trailer coming out of the water at the Long Lake boat launch in Harrison. It is not unusual to find plants on boats and trailers, but our inspector, Gilon Backlund, noticed it looked suspicious so he bagged it up and brought it to Mary Jewett at Lake Environmental Association’s Main Street office.

Red flags went up as Mary examined the specimen. It appeared to be invasive variable leaf milfoil. Even more alarming was the fact that the boat had not been in any other waterbodies this year and the north basin of Long Lake had no known infestations of this invader. After a couple years of extensive control work on infestations in Mast Cove and Salmon Point campground, both miles away, these existing problem sites are mostly under control and unlikely to be a source of new plant fragments.

Mary raised her concerns in-house at LEA, sent the plant fragment off to be positively identified by DNA and we sent out our milfoil dive team to survey the north cove of the lake. Unfortunately, what they found was not good. A house-sized swath of milfoil and several other smaller patches lurked in the shallow waters just south of Harrison Marina and in an area with heavy boat traffic all summer long.

After finding the patches, longtime crewmember and dive captain, Lucien Sulloway, was positive the patch was invasive variable leaf and eager to begin control efforts. However, we still had not gotten the DNA results back and I was hesitant to commit time, manpower, and funds to the new site. There are two native milfoils that can look alarmingly similar to variable leaf milfoil. But Lucien, who is familiar with the native varieties, was positive it was the invader.

With boat traffic increasing every day and the Fourth of July around the corner, we made the decision to cover the patches with benthic barriers that would smother the plants and keep their tendrils away from the props of boaters above.

Given the green light to move forward, Lucien and his team deployed four 20’x30’ barriers over the patches in the middle of last week. On Friday, we received word back from Saint Joseph’s professor, Lucas Bernacki, that the plant fragment we sent in was invasive variable leaf milfoil.

This alarming find won’t be the last of its kind. Long Lake stretches for 10 miles and connects to waterbodies to the south where this invader has had a strong foothold for decades. As boaters, we all need to be more careful where we go and what may be hitchhiking along with us. Both within the Long Lake-Brandy Pond-Sebago system and trailering from one waterbody to another.

If we don’t do that now, then we should plan on investing a lot more money in control work in the future… or get used to swimming and boating through weeds.

Colin Holme is the executive director at Lakes Environmental Association.