Clary Lake is experiencing an algal bloom this fall and today I was met with an unpleasant, but sadly not unexpected site when I walked down to my dock with a cup of coffee, to savor the morning. Dead blue-green algae (cyanobacteria) slowly swirling around my dock like green smoke. We’ve seen reduced lake transparency due to algae growth since late-August, and it’s only gotten worse. I’ve been expecting to see something like this on my shoreline for a while now. I posted about our declining water quality back on September 5th (Clary Water Quality Declining). This current “bloom” covered an area of about 200′ by 600′. Our last official secchi disk measurement taken on September 3rd was 2.38m (7.8 feet). I’ve taken a few additional secchi disk readings since then and they’ve all been in the 2.2m range. After seeing this mess around my dock I went out with my secchi disk and found the transparency to be 2.30m. Back on September 4th a small patch of green was spotted over at the State Boat launch, and I saw just a hint of it, a few wispy tendrils, yesterday when I was out fishing. Here’s a short video I took this morning to show you what it looked like as I headed out in my boat:

It’s not so much the dead green stuff floating on the surface that bothers me, that is just dead cyanobacteria floating to the surface, it’s ephemeral and doesn’t last long. What bothers me are conditions around our lake that allows the cyanobacteria to flourish in our water in the first place. The problem is plant food, aka phosphorus, and how it gets into our lake.

We’ve been quite fortunate in recent years, the last time we had a severe algae bloom was back in 2015. That particular instance was in part due to extreme low water. It isn’t entirely clear what has caused our water quality to decline so much this year; it is likely a combination of factors that all happened at the wrong time- a perfect storm if you will. This summer should serve as a wakeup call: Clary Lake faces many challenges and we’ve got to take its health and welfare seriously.

I’ve added some more pictures to the Spring/Summer 2022 gallery:

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