BY Jason Emerson
Editor
The warm weather has finally arrived, the leaves are on the trees and a sleek, new, bright orange aquatic weed harvester is out on Cazenovia Lake battling invasive Eurasian watermilfoil.
“That’s a nice looking boat,” said Supervisor Bill Zupan as he and Tim Hunt, town highway superintendent and town weed harvesting program coordinator, helped launch the 11-foot machine at Lakeside Park on Monday, May 23.
The 2016 Alpha Boat Unlimited aquatic weed harvester, which the town purchased in April for $240,046, has a cutting capacity of 11 feet (width) and six-to-seven-feet (depth), a 75 horsepower diesel engine and a storage capacity of 10,000 pounds.
“At the height of the season, we can fill the boat in one hour, but this one cuts eight times more weeds than our old machine,” Hunt said.
The town of Cazenovia has been working for years to reduce the amount of milfoil in Cazenovia Lake, and in 2014 the town board purchased a used seven-foot-wide aquatic weed harvester for $60,000. That machine removed hundreds of metric tons of milfoil from the lake, but last year was beset by mechanical difficulties that left it inoperable after July 4. The town rented Cayuga County’s 11-foot-wide weed harvester for one week and then used the Madison County weed harvester for the rest of the summer.
Cazenovia lake harvester crews removed two-thirds more milfoil than they did last year, partially because the Cayuga County machine was so much bigger than Cazenovia’s machine, and town officials realized they needed a bigger harvester. Also, the cost to fix the used, seven-foot machine would be so expensive that buying a new, 11-foot machine was determined to be a better option, Zupan said.
“It’s a nice machine … I’m excited; I’ve been excited for a while,” said Brian Smith, one of the two town employees who will operate the harvester during the summer.
Smith and his coworker Blake Wahl will be harvesting milfoil from 6:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. every Monday through Thursday from now through the end of September. They will start at Gypsy Bay and work north to south every week, alternating ends of the lake, all summer long, Hunt said. They will harvest parallel to the shoreline, starting at the edges and working in towards the middle of the lake, he said.
“Basically, they’ll circle the lake, move in one boat length, do a lap, move in another boat length, and do it that way,” Hunt said. This approach was decided after consultation with the Cazenovia Lake Association and lakeside property owners who felt this would be more beneficial to lake recreation, rather than going in and making one straight weed cut into a homeowner’s dock, he said.
“This year is a test case and we’ll see how it goes,” Zupan said.
The new weed harvester is not only bigger and newer than the old one, but it also has a sonar/fish finder-type device attached to the front that takes clear, sonogram-like pictures so the operators can see in real time the weeds under the boat, as well as any logs or potential obstructions. “We’re interested to see how that works,” Hunt said. “Maybe we’ll find the old canoe that’s out in the lake.”
