04 November 2016: DEP Establishes Clary Lake High Water Elevation

For the past 5 years I’ve been referencing Clary Lake water levels to the “top of the dam” for the simple reason that the actual elevation of the Normal High Water Line of Clary Lake has never been established. I knew from my own observations (picture at left) that the historical normal high water line has always been at or very near the top of the dam so it made sense to use the top of the dam both as a reference for my measurements, and as a proxy for the high water line. The picture at left shows a boulder with a distinct black stain showing the prolonged effect of the action water that corresponds to the approximate high water line of Clary Lake.

When the Clary Lake Water Level Order was issued back in late January 2014, the water level regime specified therein only referred to the “historical normal high water line” of Clary Lake without stating what the actual elevation of that line on the earth was. Special Condition #4 of the WLO required the dam owner to hire a Professional Land Surveyor to conduct an elevation survey whose job would be to establish the actual elevation of the Normal High Water Line of Clary Lake, which is defined as follows:

Normal High Water Line. “Normal high water line” means that line along the shore of a great pond, river, stream, brook or other non-tidal body of water which is apparent from visible markings, changes in the character of soils due to prolonged action of the water or from changes in vegetation and which distinguishes between predominantly aquatic and predominantly terrestrial land, 38 M. R.S. S.480-B (6)

The problem is, the dam owner didn’t comply with Special Condition #4 and in June 2014 the Department sent him a Letter of Warning for failing to provide a satisfactory survey. Continue reading →

October 2016 Water Level Chart Archived

October 2016

I’ve archived the October 2016 Water Level Chart (at left). The most notable feature of the October chart, like most of the other charts this past summer and fall, is how little the water level varied over the course of the month. Despite having received 3.45″ of rain in October, the total fluctuation from high to low for the month was only 1.68″ which is to say the lake pretty much stayed down around -69″ below the top of the dam for the entire month. It ended the month at -68.28″ below the top of the dam. This is all neatly explained by a deeply depressed water table and the ongoing drought conditions, but still, it defies common sense.

You’ve also never seen the lake this low. On October 20th I recorded the lowest water level reached to date, a mind-boggling -70.0″ below the top of the dam. I took the picture at left a few days earlier when the lake almost that low and as you can see, the outlet channel is high and dry, almost dry enough to walk across. At -70″ below the top of the dam, the volume of Clary Lake is only 54.85% of full and its area, at 425.3 acres, is down to 45.6% of it’s size when full. These are mind boggling numbers. For what it’s worth, the lake didn’t stay that low for long, 0.91″ of rain the following day brought the lake up a whopping 1/4″.

As mentioned, we received 3.45″ of rain in October which sounds like a lot but the average for the month is 4.37″. At a total of 28.82″ so far this year, we’re still 5.48″ short of rainfall for the year so far.

26 October 2016: Updated Transparency & Phosphorus Charts Posted

Every fall after the water quality monitoring activities end for the year (see “2016 Water Quality Monitoring Season Concludes“) I make a point of updating the Transparency and Total Phosphorus charts for Clary Lake, posting them on the website, and writing about them. I also share them with the Maine VLMP and the Maine DEP. These graphs now depict 41 years worth of data collected by certified water quality monitors from 1975 through the end of the just-ended 2016 season. Both graphs continue to show alarming trends, toward higher phosphorus levels and lower secchi disk readings. These trends are familiar to us, and go hand in hand: phosphorus feeds algae whose rapid growth reduces transparency. When transparency drops below 2 meters, you’ve got a bloom. As phosphorus levels trend up, transparency trends down. The trend lines of both graphs are clearly influenced by data from the last 10 years, and in particular, from the last 5. And we all know what’s been happening to Clary Lake over the last 5 years.

As mentioned, secchi disk readings below 2 meters (6.6′) signify an algae bloom in progress. As you can see from the above chart, prior to 2009 we didn’t record any secchi disk readings below 2 meters. In 2009 we experienced a severe algae bloom- Clary’s first- with secchi disk readings of 1.60m on 8/28/09 and 1.25m on 9/11/09. I don’t have any record of lake levels for that summer, but it was an exceedingly wet summer season with 22.9″ of rain recorded in Augusta for the 4 month period May, June, July, and August. That’s over half the average yearly rainfall, received in just 4 months. This would have resulted in significant runoff and undoubtedly played a major role in the algae bloom that summer. Continue reading →

2016 Water Quality Monitoring Season Concludes

David Hodsdon (with DO meter) & Jack Holland, June 3, 2016

David Hodsdon and I concluded our water quality monitoring on Clary Lake for 2016 with our last data collection session this past Sunday morning. It was cold and windy. Roughly every 2 weeks since we started on May 20th, rain or shine, David and I (and Jack Holland when he could make it) have ventured out to the “deep hole” in my boat to collect water quality data including water transparency (secchi disk readings) and dissolved oxygen/temperature measurements. Three to four times a year we take a core sample of water for Phosphorus analysis. This information is periodically submitted to the Maine Volunteer Lake Monitor Program (VLMP) for review and analysis. We usually start collecting data in mid to late April, and my boat was ready to go this spring but our YSI Pro 20 Dissolved Oxygen Meter was in the shop for repairs and we didn’t get it back until mid May. Maine Volunteer Lake Monitor Program of which the Clary Lake Association is a longtime member wants water monitoring data collected during the boating season which is generally understood to extend from May through September. This year we collected data on 13 separate occasions. Continue reading →

Harvest Potluck Supper Flier

These flyers will be going up around town this coming week. Download one!

Harvest Potluck Supper

a benefit for the

Clary Lake Association

Saturday November 12 at Sheepscot General
from 4:00 to 7:00 PM
$7.00 adults, $3.00 children

Mark your calendars! The Clary Lake Association invites you to join us, the community coming together, lakeshore owners, neighbors, friends, and family alike, for a Harvest Potluck Supper to enjoy each other’s company, good home cookin’ and to celebrate our Lake.

We are still looking for volunteers willing to contribute food: crockpot items, casseroles, salads, desserts, & beverages. People interested in contributing to this event, please contact Margaret Fergusson @ 207-458-3143, Mary Gingrow-Shaw @ 207-622-3308, or Erin Grimshaw @ 207-346-4640.

Hope to see you there! Check for updates on the Clary Lake Association website as the event draws near: https://clarylake.org/

17 October 2016: New Caching Engine installed, Misc. Site Changes

Back on October 12th I posted Yet Another Site Update Notice about how I planned to go in search of a new caching engine. Well, I found one and over the past week I have been getting it setup and tested, a process that has not been without challenges. This new caching engine has a lot more buttons and dials than the one we have been using (which pretty much just had an on/off switch). From where I’m sitting, this new engine is doing a MUCH BETTER job of caching and as a result, speeding up the site. I’d be very interested in YOUR user experience! Continue reading →

13 October 2016: Looking For Volunteers

I’m looking for volunteers to help with testing our email and digital newsletter distribution system. Recent events have made it painfully clear that we need to make some improvements if we’re going to be able to reliably email our Membership.

Sending emails is pretty much routine these days and generally a reliable means of communicating as long as humans are doing it, but as soon as you put a program in control of the process and try sending an email, announcement, or newsletter to even as few as 80 or 100 addresses, remote mail hosts get twitchy, some more twitchy than others. If they sense spam, they’re either going mark it as spam so it ends up in the recipient’s spam folder, or they are just as likely to reject the message outright. Spammers are getting more sophisticated and spam has become a serious problem. Mail hosts are increasingly taking a “shoot first, ask questions later” approach in dealing with it. This may minimize the spam that ends up in your mailbox, but it also can prevent legitimate non-spam emails from being delivered. There are ways to minimize the chances that a bulk email will be marked as spam, but there are no guarantees.

The Clary Lake Association has sent several emails to its membership in the past few months. The first one was about the Boat Launch Cleanup Initiative back in August, and more recently, an email about the upcoming Harvest Potluck Supper was sent to our Membership just a few days ago. Both emails failed to successfully get sent to all addresses on the first try, with each requiring additional shenanigans on my part to finally get the emails sent. It was a tedious process and not wholly satisfying, to say the least. And for all that, I still have no idea how many of those emails ended up in spam folders or weren’t delivered at all. I do know that for the most recent email, for whatever reason, only about 1/3 of the emails that I know were actually sent have been opened. We can do better than that. Continue reading →

12 October 2016: Yet Another Site Update Notice

[dropcap]For[/dropcap] something over year now we’ve been using a page/file caching system on this site to speed up page delivery. It’s been working flawlessly and I’ve been quite happy with it. The caching engine is part of a multi-feature site security package called WordFence we use and it has helped speed things up tremendously. Yesterday I received notice from WordFence that they intend to remove the caching engine from their program in a few weeks. This has sent me on a quest to find a new caching engine to replace it.

I’ll be trying out some different caching engines over the next week or so, so be prepared for things to variously work fast, work slow, depending one what I’m up to. It will likely take some time to get a new cache working and tweaked. I installed one earlier today only to discover that it broke the lightbox effect for pictures in the News feed. Not acceptable.

07 October 2016: Remote Access to All 3 ClaryCams Finally Working

Real-time remote access to all 3 Clary webcams is finally working. My tendency is to explain in excruciating detail WHY it wasn’t working and WHAT I had to do to get it working. Instead I’ll just say there was a port conflict and a few other issues which prevented operating 2 cameras on the same internal network at the same time, and leave it at that.

Remote access to firewalled equipment requires Dynamic DNS service, and that is notoriously flakey. When access to a camera is NOT working, it is almost always due to the DDNS being out of date. DDNS is a mechanism whereby a dynamic IP address (which most of us have) is mapped to a static host name (which most of us want). Foscam, the camera manufacturer, runs a free DDNS service for their customers but it seems like it often doesn’t update the static host name with the right IP address in a timely manner. I’ve setup an account with a 3rd party DDNS server for my two cameras (Clarycam1 and Clarycam2) which seems to be working well. If it continues to work well I’ll see if I can get David Hodsdon to signup with the same service. For now his camera which is using the Myfoscam.org DDNS service is working fine…

Bottom line: If you try to connect to a camera and it fails, try again in half an hour. Continue reading →

06 October 2016: Clary Lake Parcel Map Now Online

Clary Lake Parcel Map

If you haven’t figured it out by now, I love maps. I love looking at maps and during my nearly 4 decades in the Surveying profession I made a lot of maps, as part of my job. Now I make maps for fun and making cool and useful maps has gotten faster & easier with freely available Geographic Information System and CAD software integrated with database systems and online mapping services like Google Earth, Google Maps, and Google Fusion Tables. Enhancing traditional data with Geocodes (latitude and longitude) like a mailing list allows you to look at information in ways that hasn’t been all that easy to do in the past. This latest map is a Parcel Map (image above) that I’ve just completed using Google Maps and Google Fusion tables which shows property parcels in and around the Clary Lake Watershed with blue dots representing the locations of everyone in our Clary Lake mailing list database. It wasn’t particularly hard to do, the tedious part was scaling a latitude and longitude off a map and assigning it to a name in a spreadsheet. The rest was just data manipulation. The tax parcel information comes from the Maine Office of GIS, a great site which offers loads of free geocoded data, digital terrain data, and photography.

Some of you will recognize this map as similar to the Clary Lake Watershed Survey from a couple of years ago which uses the same parcel information, and the Clary Lake depth map which uses the same base map of the area. Continue reading →

Test Posting Complete with Picture [UPDATE]

[UPDATE]: After pondering the problem I wrote about last night while I slept, I got up this morning and killed/reestablished the backend connection to WordPress.com and lo and behold, both notification emails and automagic posting to Facebook is working again.

It’s not a job, it’s an adventure.

I’ll be posting a few test articles in an attempt to resolve the email notification problem. Your patience is appreciated.

05 October 2016: A Few Site Issues To Be Aware Of

For some reason a few back end services on this website have stopped working, and I have no idea what the problem is. First the emails that get sent out to people who’ve subscribed to CLA News updates via email are not getting sent any more. No idea why. These emails are sent by WordPress.com and I’ve checked and they still have the email addresses on file and they’re aware of new posts and everything looks like it should be working, but it ain’t. The notification emails just aren’t getting sent when a new article is posted.

Second, the mechanism that automagically submits new posts to the Clary Lake Association Facebook page is failing, without error and without explanation. For the time being I’m manually posting links to new articles on Facebook and will continue to do so until things are working again.

I suspect both problems are related. Hopefully I’ll figure out what’s wrong and get it fixed or it will just miraculously start working again, I’m OK with that happening.

05 October 2016: Clary Lake Water Level Order Appeal Update

Back on September 9th I wrote that a conference with the court had been scheduled for October 4th to address questions of Discovery in the Clary Lake WLO appeal. In fact, Attorneys with the Office of the Attorney General representing DEP and counsel for AquaFortis Associates (AQF) held a Status Conference by telephone yesterday afternoon with Lincoln County Superior Court Judge Daniel Billings to discuss the State’s requested discovery and the Petitioner’s objections to that discovery. “The Court needs more time” was my take away from a brief phone call I had today with Assistant Attorney General Scott Boak about yesterday’s meeting. The parties agreed to meet again towards the end of the month of October to continue their work to resolve the conflicts. A date to meet has not yet been set.

The State initially filed their request for discovery on August 2nd and their Administrative Record on August 17th; on August 30th Petitioners filed objections to the State’s discovery and on the following day, their own requested discovery to supplement the Adminstrative Record (see “AquaFortis Associates Files Objections to DEP Discovery Requests“). I understand that the State has, or intends, to object to Petitioner’s requested discovery.

The Wheels of Justice turn slowly. Stay tuned.

02 October 2016: Where Are Our Members Located?

Clary Lake Association Members. Google Earth photograph with Jefferson and Whitefield Parcels highlighted in red to show where the Current Year CLA Members are located. As you can see, we’re well represented by Jefferson property owners, somewhat less so by Whitefield property owners. Prepared by George Fergusson 02 October 2016

Well, as it turns out, mostly in Jefferson! Or at least that’s how it looks on the Google Earth photograph at left which shows parcels owned by CLA members colored RED. In actual fact, owners of approximately 55% of the lake shore properties in Whitefield are members of the CLA while in Jefferson the figure it more like 65% which is not a really significant difference. It just looks significant because the majority of shore front property in Jefferson belongs to CLA members whereas there are a lot of large acreage properties with large amounts of shore front located in Whitefield whose owners are not members of the Association. Just a few of those Whitefield residents joining the Association would change the look of the map considerably. There are also a few members who live outside of the Clary Lake watershed who aren’t represented on this map. Continue reading →

September 2016 Water Level Chart Archived

September 2016

I’ve archived the September 2016 Water Level Chart (at left). The most notable feature of the September chart, like last month was the slow but steady fall of the water level as the result of the ongoing drought. Last month the lake fell 3.6″ for the month at an average rate of 0.12″ per day, due entirely to evaporation. With the weather having cooled a bit, the lake fell only 2.88″ in September at an average rate of not quite 0.10″ per day, again due entirely to evaporation. Any slight rise in the water level resulting from the limited rainfall we received was quickly wicked away into the surrounding shoreline. At nearly -70″ below the top of the dam, you have never seen the lake this low. Continue reading →

01 October 2016: Site Map Added to Website

I’ve added a clickable Site Map listing all the pages on the website in alphabetical order. You’ll find it in two places, first under the Home main menu heading and as a text link on the right sidebar right under the Search box. This site map won’t be of interest to most people but those trying to navigate the site with a touch screen tablet, phone, or other mobile device may find it useful. Each top level page of the map corresponds to a Main Menu Heading (i.e., About, News, Charts & Data, etc.) and consists of a page that lists all the sub-pages under that heading. Note that the actual Main Menu Headings themselves at the top of each page are not links (with the exception of Home and Branch Pond) so clicking on them doesn’t do anything but show you the drop down menu but if you select one of those top level links from the Site Map, you’ll go to the page which shows a list of sub-pages under that heading.

You’ll perhaps also notice that not all the pages shown on the map actually show up under any of the main menu headings. This is not a mistake! The Site Map page is dynamically generated so theoretically it should update with changes, additions and deletions automatically.

The need for a Site Map came about as a result of changes I made to the menu system last month, changes which made things generally work better for most people but which also broke navigation for a small subset of other people, most notably iPod and iPhone users. A site map can give people on certain touch-screen devices easier access to the links they’re looking for.

Putting together this site map should have been cake-easy but I built a good deal of this site back in 2013 when I was still learning how to use WordPress. As a result, there wasn’t much organization in my page layout and almost no hierarchy. Figuring out what I’d done and in some cases rearranging or creating the page hierarchy from scratch has been a bit challenging. Also, a few pages and/or links to files got lost in the process. As I find errors, I’ll correct them. Feel free to bring broken links to my attention. You’ll find the new Site Map below: Continue reading →

CLA Harvest Pot Luck Supper This November 12th

Mark your calendars! The Clary Lake Association Momentum Committee invites you to join us- the community coming together, lakeshore owners, neighbors, friends, and family alike, for a Harvest Potluck Supper to enjoy each other’s company, good home cookin’ and to celebrate our Lake.

Our Potluck supper will take place on Saturday, November 12, 2016 at The Sheepscot General on Townhouse Road in Whitefield from 4-7pm. The full scope of the event is still being developed, but we are now actively soliciting volunteers willing to contribute food— crock pot items, casseroles, salads, desserts, beverages. The cost is $7.00 for adults and $3.00 for children under 12. There will also be a raffle with details to be announced. Also look for ongoing updates here about the event as the date draws closer. You’ll find this event marked on the CLA Events Calendar. The Harvest Supper is coming up [fergcorp_cdt_single date=”November 12, 2016 3:00 PM EST”].

Add this event to your Google Calendar:

The Momentum Committee was formed to foster a positive outlook as we move forward, appreciating what we have been given even in the face of the challenges presented by our lake’s current condition, acknowledging the challenges ahead, remembering all the hard work that has been done and will need to continue to be done in order to bring our lake back to its full health. It’s a call to thankfulness, generosity and goodwill and to focus on the simple yet powerful potential in people coming together. This event will be one of many in our continued commitment to celebrate the bounty of community and the importance of reverent stewardship of our nature resources.

The money raised will be used in part to fund future Momentum Committee events and activities. For more information or to contribute to this event, please contact Margaret Fergusson @ 207-458-3143; Mary Gingrow-Shaw @ 207-622-3308, or Erin Grimshaw @ 207-346-4640. You can also email the Momentum Committee with questions or suggestions.

24 September 2016: Clary_Cam2 BACK in Service

Clary Cam3

[dropcap]ClaryCam2[/dropcap] is back up and running again and due to a fortuitous (or not) set of circumstances we’ve expanded our coverage of Clary Lake by adding a third cam designated Clary_Cam3 (picture at left). This new cam is located right next to Clary_Cam1 on the Fergusson shoreline on the south side of the lake, and it points roughly NNE towards the Grant/Gillette property over on the Northeast shore. While I’ve toyed with the idea of putting up a 3rd camera in the past, I hadn’t planned on doing it any time soon. To make a long story short however, the original Clary_Cam2 camera turned out not to have been damaged at all by the lightning strike, but this fact wasn’t discovered until after David Hodsdon had already ordered and received a drop-in replacment camera. So after we reinstalled the original Clary_Cam2 hardware this morning and got it up and running, I made David an offer on the new camera that he couldn’t refuse. It didn’t take me long to get it too up and running.

Between these 3 cameras over 95% of Clary Lake is covered by Clary_cams. The Google Earth image at left shows the rough Fields of View (FOV) of the 3 cameras. There are only a few coves on the south shore and a small gore between the coverage of Cams 2 and 3 that don’t appear on a photograph.

You’ll find all 3 cameras on the revised Clary Lake Webcams page. For now all 3 cameras are uploading photographs to the webserver ever 2 minutes. As I find the time I’ll work to get the remote access funtionality working better for those of you who like to log into the cameras and see real-time video. However, be advised that the networking mumbo-jumbo required to get people out on the internet happily passing packets on a certain port with a certain camera located behind a router, behind a firewall, behind a cable modem with a dynamic IP address (subject to change!) is non-trivial… Anything that can go wrong often does go wrong with the result being a failure to connect.

If anyone is trying to connect in real time and is having trouble, please contact me. Remote access to Clary_Cam2 is currently working for me. No guarantees how long that will continue!

19 September 2016: Site Notice

Off and on for the past 24 hours or so one of the web sites on our web server was under a socalled “Brute Force Amplification Attack” by someone with an IP address originating from inside Russia. While only one site hosted on the server was under direct attack, service was was at least partially disrupted for all sites hosted on the server. If you’ve had trouble getting to our site last night or this morning, now you know why. Fortunately the attack was detected before the target site was compromised, so no permanent damage was done or data compromised. This kind of activity is unfortunately all too common now days.

To thwart the attack we have temporarily blocked incoming and outgoing connections to the web server from all locations outside the continental US and Canada. Unfortunately has had the side effect of breaking some of our site functionality. In particular, the weather widget in the sidebar (it actually gets it’s data from a place in England of all places) and a few other back end systems are not functioning yet. We should have full functionality restored by sometime tonight.

Never a dull minute.

18 September 2016: NIDIS Drought Meter Now Online

sev I don’t need to tell anybody that we need rain. For some time now we’ve been experiencing SEVERE drought conditions around Clary Lake and SEVERE to EXTREME drought conditions in and around New England, depending on locale. I found this neat CGI script at the National Integrated Drought Information System site that provides up-to-date drought information and decided to put it on our website. Enter one of Clary Lake’s 2 Zip Codes (Whitefield o4353 or Jefferson 04348) for current drought conditions here. For current drought conditions in your area, enter your own zip code (or search for one). You can reset it with the reset button to check different areas. It works for the entire country.

Once you’ve entered a zip code, you’ll find some useful information by following the links provided under the Drought Meter graphic. The National Integrated Drought Information System is a great site to poke around. I’ve added it to our Links & Resources page.

I have put up a Drought Meter page. Check it out. You’ll find the page linked under the Weather Main Menu heading.