ST. MARYS — The Grand Lake St. Marys Restoration Commission recently released their plans for water quality improvement in the lake in the Adaptive Management Plan pamphlet.
The plan lists nine focus areas the commission intends to improve and implement over the next five years, said Thomas Knapke, coordinator and facilitator for the Grand Lake St. Marys Restoration Committee. These focus areas include, but are not limited to, the creation of treatment trains, the removal of rough fish from the lake and improvements to the East Beach area.
“Treatment trains are a filtering system,” Knapke explained. “It’s like a kidney. You have water drain through a grassy area before entering the lake. The foliage will strain out any phosphorous, other nutrients and soil.”
This would leave only clean water behind to enter the lake, he said. The problem with treatment trains is the unpredictability of the weather. Water can’t be flowing into the treatment trains constantly because if it covers the foliage, which is acting as the filter, it will die and the train fails and when it’s dry there is a similar problem, Knapke explained. To balance this problem, pumps will be installed in the treatment trains. When it’s dry in the summer the pumps will take water from the lake, pump it through the artificial wetlands and back into the lake, he said.
Rough fish is a term used to describe unwanted fish in the lake, like carp. Knapke said so far they have removed approximately 15,000 pounds of carp from Grand Lake. They have to be removed because they skim the bottom of the lake and disturb the phosphorous settled there, he explained. They also tear up tear up the foliage in the treatment trains and along the shorelines, too.
“Our lake is out of balance,” Knapke said. “We have more rough fish than sport fish.”
They have tagged around 25 carp and are using them to track them to where the schools are, he said. The commission has commercial fishermen use nets to catch and remove the fish, which presents its own problems, Knapke said. There are many sunken stumps and logs in the lake which presents the risk of fishing nets getting caught and destroyed releasing the carp back into the lake.
Knapke said there is no single focus point of the commission’s nine that is more important then any other. Implementing new and better water testing procedures is just as important as installing all of the treatment trains, he explained. Improving agricultural uses of phosphorous and manure is just as important as removing carp from the lake or drudging the sludge from the lake bottom. He said the lake is out of balance and each of these things is as important as the other.
“We have to get the lake back in balance,” Knapke said.
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Steven and Ginger Dankirt from Lima come to Grand Lake at least once a week to fish throught spring and some of June. But they stop coming in late June, early July when the algae gets bad. The water turns green, smells and, according to Ginger, looks so thick you might be able to cut it with a knife.
