October 2024 Water Level Chart Archived

I have archived the October 2024 water level chart (above, and at left). The dry weather we experienced in September continued into October which is normally one of our wettest months, second only to November in average monthly rainfall. All told we only received only 2.13 inches of rain in October. For the year we’re still about 8 inches above normal precipitation thanks to excessive rain in March, June, and August but rainfall for September and October combined is only 3.89 inches, 4.40 inches less than normal. Despite the shortage of rain this fall, it is likely that ground water supplies are still in pretty good shape but the ground surface is pretty dried out and the fire danger is high. The US Drought Monitor shows this area as being “Abnormally Dry” but in “Moderate Drought” just a mile to the east of Clary Lake. Continue reading →

Richard B. Gallion October 11, 1947 – October 23, 2024

It is with great sadness that I post this obituary of Rick Gallion that appeared in today’s online version of the Central Maine Papers. Rick always had a ready smile, a hearty laugh, and a helping hand which he extended freely and often. He will be missed.

JEFFERSON – Richard B. Gallion, 77, died suddenly on Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2024, at Maine Medical Center in Portland.

Rick was born in Kansas City, Mo., on Oct. 11, 1947, the son of the late Virgil A. and Doris E. (Johnson) Gallion. He grew up in southeast Kansas and earned a B.A. in French literature from Pittsburg State University.

Rick served as a Green Beret in the United States Army but had conflicted feelings about the U.S. military. Rick married Saundra Mackey while he was in the service, and they divorced some years later after many adventures together. Saundra preceded in him death.

On Oct. 5, 1996, Rick married the love of his life, Linda S. Marrs Farrell, at the Topeka Kansas Unitarian Universalist Fellowship. Together they shared 28 wonderful years of marriage. Continue reading →

Sad News about Rick Gallion

I received word earlier today from Linda Gallion that her husband and business partner, Rick Gallion, passed away yesterday, very suddenly. Rick ran the Clary Lake Woodworking School and he and Linda together have run the Clary Lake Bed and Breakfast for the past 20 years. Rick was a good friend. He was 77 years old. Our thoughts and prayers go out to Linda and the family in this sad time.

Pictures of Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS

Here are a couple of pictures (at left and above) of Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS taken by a friend of mine, John Meader, a really cool and talented photographer. The one at left was a handheld photograph. Amazing. Reproduced with permission. Among other things, he runs Northern Stars Planetarium.

Tonight’s sky is looking promising. For tips on observing, see yesterday’s post! Good Luck!

Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS Ready For Viewing!

If you didn’t get a chance to spot Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS when it was a morning object, you still have a chance to catch it as an evening object. This is the brightest comet to pass by earth in some time. You’ll want to find a viewing place with a clear horizon to the west and be looking for it shortly after sunset which is currently 5:53 PM EST here in Whitefield. By 6:30 PM it should be visible about 20° above the horizon, almost due west. You’ll also see Venus, it’ll be quite bright. The comet will be a little to the right of and above Venus. You’ll also be able to see the moon and Saturn rising in the east. The comet has already swung around the Sun and is heading out of our solar system but it should remain visible for a few weeks. The comet is about magnitude 3.6 which makes it an easy naked eye object. Bring a pair of binoculars. Good luck!

Here’s a fun to use Star chart application:

https://stellarium-web.org/

More information about the comet:

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/153444/comet-tsuchinshan-atlas-arrives-from-afar

A Watershed Moment [Video]

I happened across this video the other day and thought it worth sharing with our readers. It makes me think of how Clary Lake fits into a bigger picture, a picture we tend not to think about very often. “A Watershed Moment” tells the story of an all-hands effort involving fishermen, three coastal Maine communities, non-profit organizations, and state and federal management agencies to restore fish passage throughout the entire Bagaduce River Watershed in Maine. These grassroots efforts to bring back alewife, a keystone species that has allowed fishing communities to thrive have been remarkably successful. An unlikely group of partners, the story of this partnership is rooted in collaboration and can act as a beacon of hope for other communities and watersheds involved in fish passage restoration and community-driven science and stewardship. A Watershed Moment is a story about people, fish, and the water that connects them.

September 2024 Water Level Chart Archived

September 2024

I have archived the September 2024 water level chart (above, and at left). September is often when fall rains start to pick up but that didn’t happen this year. September was dry. Normal rainfall for the month is 3.84 inches but this year we received less than half that amount, just 1.75 inches with most of it coming in one storm on the 26th. Still, despite drought conditions in September, for the year with 42.32 inches, we’re still well above normal rainfall for this date. Prior to the rain storm late last week, the US Drought Monitor showed our area to be “Abnormally dry” and I don’t think the rainfall fully alleviated that condition. Still, there’s a good deal of ground water thanks to all the excess rainfall we’ve received this season. Continue reading →

Fall Turnover Causing Some Algae Growth

Some of you might have noticed a little green algae collecting on your shoreline over the last couple of days. This is dead cyanobacteria that floats to the surface and gets pushed around by a gentle breeze. It dissipates fairly quickly so it’s easy to miss, it is what is often referred to as an “ephemeral algal bloom”. As the lake cools off and the thermocline breaks down, Phosphorus from the bottom of the lake starts to mix with the epilimnion (upper water layer) and it stimulates some algae growth. This is fairly normal this time of year for a mesotrophic lake like Clary. We’ve seen much worse. These events are usually so ephemeral that they often go unnoticed, especially with fewer people on or near the water at this time of year. I think we’ll avoid a severe bloom this fall thanks the low Phosphorus levels in the lake this summer: our August 11th water sample for Total Phosphorus testing came back at a paltry 11 µg/L (micrograms per liter) which is a record low value for Clary Lake going back to 1975. We’ll be taking one final water sample for TP testing next weekend.

Minor algal blooms like this do not pose a health risk for humans or animals.

Lydia Smith Grant April 25, 1927 – August 27, 2024

I have known Diane for years, I honestly can’t remember when we first met. She’s always had a ready smile, a quick laugh, and a kind word to say whenever I saw her. The picture at left (and above) taken by her grandson, Andrew Seba, truly embodies the joyful, playful spirit of this woman. Both she and her husband Ed were close friends of my family, and they’ve been Clary Lake Association members since the very early days. I last saw Diane at a gathering last fall at her home on Clary Lake. The party was well attended and she was, as usual, in rare form. She will be remembered, and she will be missed. The following is her obituary which was sent to me by her daughter Kate Grant Seba.
George Fergusson, 01 September 2024

Lydia “Diane” Smith Grant, a native of Bath, Maine, and long-time resident of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, passed away peacefully at home surrounded by her family on Tuesday, August 27, 2024, at the age of 97. Continue reading →

Whitefield 2024 Property Revaluation Causing Concerns

RJD Appraisal has completed its town-wide revaluation of Whitefield for the 2024 tax year, the first such property revaluation since 2009. The revaluation represents a 100% market value assessment of all the property in the town and the mil rate has dropped from 16 down to 10.10 mils. Regarding the revaluation of Clary Lake shore property, the valuation of a 1/2 acre “base lot” which used to be valued at roughly $40,000 now has a valuation of $275,000. The result is that while estimated taxes on many properties in the town have dropped, the estimated taxes on most Clary Lake shorefront properties in Whitefield have risen dramatically, in many cases by more than 200%. This revaluation has created a serious hardship for some Clary Lake shore owners, many of whom are Clary Lake Association members. We have watched helplessly in recent years as the prices paid for shorefront lots on Clary Lake have risen higher and higher, realizing that a property revaluation reflecting those higher prices was bound to happen. And now it has. Mainers are in fact some of the most heavily taxed citizens in the United States. As Benjamin Franklin so aptly said, “Nothin is certain except death and taxes.” Continue reading →

August 2024 Water Level Chart Archived

August 2024

I have archived the August 2024 water level chart (above, and at left). This is typically the time of year when drought takes over and evaporation controls the lake level but we actually received enough rain in August to mostly offset water loss from evaporation and leakage. We started the month with the lake level down -0.54 feet and ended the month down only -0.70 feet for a net loss of 0.16 feet or 1.9 inches. What’s more, the average rainfall from any given storm was only a quarter of an inch so we didn’t have any large, fast storms which would have washed sediment into the lake. The upside is it helped our water quality remain high while still getting enough rain to keep things green but the downside is it did seem like it rained all month. In fact, we got some amount of rain on 19 of the 31 days of the month so it might have seemed like we got more rain than we did. As for rainfall, we ended the month having received 4.92 inches of rain, only 1.59 inches more than normal but for the year, we’re at a whopping 40.56 inches of precipitation or fully 12.81 inches MORE water than is normal for the end of August. Continue reading →

August 2024 Purple Loosestrife Update

Last year Clary Lake Association member Alan Clark made a major effort to remove Purple Loosestrife plants from around Clary Lake (see: Purple Loosestrife Eradication Project Update), and this summer he’s really outdone himself. He just finished tossing onto our burn pile 14 grain bags stuffed with plants he dug up over the past couple of days from areas adjacent to Clary Lake. I really don’t know how to thank Alan for the effort he has put into this eradication effort! Alan is also one of our more active Courtesy Boat Inspectors and due to his education and experience, he has a lot to offer the Clary Lake Association. Alan Clark and his wife Linda spend the summer at their camp on the Devine Road in Whitefield and the remainder of the year in a small town in Utah (Grantsville), 30 miles west of Salt Lake City. Linda is from Greene, Maine and Alan grew up in southwestern Ohio in a small town west of Dayton. They attended the University of Maine-Orono where they met, married after their junior year and received their BS degrees, Linda in biology and Alan in Wildlife Management, in 1973. We’re fortunate to have them as Association members!

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The 2024 Annual Membership Meeting Happened!

We held the 2024 Annual Membership Meeting last Saturday, August 17th, at the home of Gareth & Beverly Bowen. With 36 members attending the meeting, attendance was perhaps a little lighter than expected but nonetheless way more than enough to meet the quorum requirement. I’ll post formal minutes when they’re ready. In the meantime, the main takeaways from the meeting were:

We have a new Treasurer! Mary Gingrow-Shaw, first elected treasurer back in 2015, announced at last year’s Annual meeting that her 5th term as Treasurer to which she had just been elected would be her final term. We were able to find a replacement in Donald Hogg. Don brings extensive financial savvy to the table. He and his wife Maggie Muth (a Board member, by the way) live in Portland and have owned a camp over on Maplewood Road since 2019. Don was elected Treasurer by a unanimous vote. Mary was given a certificate of appreciation and a lovely Weigela bush as a parting gift. We’re grateful for her many years of service to the Association. Mary will continue to handle the Annual Loon Count.
Malcolm Burson stepped down from his second and final term on the Board to make room for a new Director, Hillary Relyea. Hillary’s family owns property on the south side of Clary Lake in Jefferson. Hillary is a school teacher and the daughter of Association Vice President Steven Relyea and lives with her husband Ben Gerdts, also a school teacher, and two young children. We’re all excited about this young and energetic addition to our Board. Malcolm first served as Vice President from 2011 to 2014, then as President from 2015 through 2018, and as a Director from 2019 through 2024. We’re not done with Malcolm yet. He will continue in his role as Chair of the Watershed Survey Steering Committee and of the LakeSmart program.
On a recommendation from the Fundraising Committee, a motion was made to the Membership to raise our Membership dues from $25 to $30 per member to take effect next year. There was little discussion of the motion except to express surprise that we hadn’t raised our dues a long time ago. The motion passed unanimously. We last raised our dues fifteen years ago, in 2009. Those 2009 Dues thanks to inflation are now worth somewhere around $16, or to look at it another way, we’d have had to raise our dues to $39 or more to stay even with 2009 dollars. Sigh.
The Main Program on the recently completed 2024 Watershed Survey (presented by Malcolm Burson, see picture above) and the committee reports presented by Charlene Andersen (Fundraising), Steve Cowles (Dam Operations), Margaret Fergusson (Events) and George Fergusson (Courtesy Boat Inspections and Water Quality Monitoring) were all very interesting and informative.
This year for the first time we offered Zoom access to the meeting so people who couldn’t attend in person would be able to attend virtually. We had 6 people online for the meeting including myself and my wife Margaret (both with COVID), Ben Gerdts and his wife Hillary Relyea, Steve Relyea, and Leslie Gillette. Technically it went better than I had expected! We’ll be doing this again.

Continue reading →

Coffee Klatch on Clary Lake: August 24th

Many thanks to June Lordi and Steve Cowles for taking charge of this year’s Coffee Klatch! Here’s June’s pitch for the event:

Hey Clary Lakers: to wrap up the summer, we’re resurrecting the Coffee Klatch out on the Lake which first happened back in 2019. A number of water craft tied up near the middle of the lake and shared coffee, donuts, and laughter. You are invited to meet again this Saturday August 24th at 10:00AM. See you there!!

The rain date is the next day, Sunday the 25th. Where exactly on Clary Lake the flotilla will form will depend in part on the prevailing winds. Wherever the wind is coming from, that’s the shoreline you’ll find us closest to. If there isn’t much wind, look for us near the middle of the lake. Steve & company will be in his pontoon boat serving up coffee and donuts. We shouldn’t be too hard to find!

Clary Water Transparency Record Broken!

Yesterday August 11th, during our regularly scheduled water quality monitoring session I obtained a secchi disk reading of 5.45 meters (17.88 feet) which is a new transparency record for Clary Lake. The previous record was 5.30 meters observed on September 14, 1994. You can see today’s data point sitting all by it’s lonesome, high on the right side of the above chart, and noticeably higher than any other dot on the chart. Kelsie French who normally accompanies me wasn’t able to join me today so my wife Margaret came out to help. She tried her hand at taking a secchi disk reading and got 5.25 meters, only 4 inches shallower than my reading.

We also took a 4 meter core water sample for Total Phosphorus testing, our third TP test of the summer so far, We’ll take another one in mid-September. Not surprisingly given our clear water this summer, the first 2 TP tests came back at 0.012 mg/L which is exceptionally low for Clary Lake.

Our water quality data is available on our Clary Lake Water Monitoring Data page.

Yet Another Purple Loosestrife Eradication Update

The invasive plant Purple Loosestrife has been popping up around Clary Lake for some years now (the above picture shows Malcolm Burson cautiously sneaking up on an unsuspecting Purple Loosestrife plant back in July 2018) and this year is no exception. In previous years Malcolm Burson and I have taken on the plant removal task ourselves, but last year was just more than we could manage alone. Thankfully, Alan Clark stepped up and did an epic job of digging loads of PL out of a nearby field (see Purple Loosestrife Eradication Project Update) bagging it, and disposing of it on my burn pile. This year I had spotted some new plant locations, but with both Malcolm and I recovering from illnesses, we needed some more help. Well Hillary Relyea and her husband Ben Gerdts stepped up! They have property on the south side of Clary Lake (Hillary is the daughter or our Vice President, Steve Relyea) and they jumped at the opportunity to help with this initiative. They headed out today in kayaks and extracted 5 plants from around the lake including this monster up in the marsh that I had by chance spotted during the Marsh Paddle event last month. I’ve removed some big plants and I still can’t believe the size of that root ball he got out of the ground. Continue reading →

July 2024 Water Level Chart Archived

I have archived the July 2024 water level chart (above, and at left). July was a hot and seemingly dry month, though in fact we received the average amount of precipitation for July of 3.53 inches. Most of the rain fell in the first half of the month and as a result, the lake level remained at or slightly above the top of the dam until the 17th when drier weather settled in for the rest of the month. We ended the month down -0.54 feet below the HWM, having lost only 0.37 feet of water, with evaporation accounting for about 3/4 of that loss. Still, even with only average rainfall for July, we’re at 140% of annual precipitation for this date, thanks to above average rainfall in March, April, and June. Continue reading →

Midsummer Water Quality Update

Clary’s water quality this summer is in a word, awesome. I’m sure any of you who’ve been swimming will agree! The clarity so far this summer is measurably better than we’ve seen in a long time. Last weekend on July 14th Kelsie French and I went out for our biweekly water quality monitoring session at the “deep hole” and we both had secchi disk readings of 4.81 meters (15.77 feet). This is the deepest secchi disk reading we’ve recorded since a 4.88 meter (16.00 feet) reading back in May 2003 (see chart at left). There have been less than 10 secchi disk readings as good or better than today’s, going back to 1975, and none in the last 20 years. Extraordinary. Today’s secchi disk reading was actually the 5th consecutive reading deeper than 4 meters, also extraordinary. We haven’t had a stretch of clear summer water like this in Clary Lake for a long time. Continue reading →

Upcoming Event: Our Ice Cream Social and Marsh Paddle

Our Annual Summer Ice Cream Social is scheduled for Saturday July 20th at the Clary Lake dam. It will be preceded by a BYOK Marsh Paddle (Bring Your Own Kayak) which will take place in the morning. Needless to say, a canoe is fine too! The Ice Cream Social will follow, at its usual time of 1PM. People who wish to participate in the Marsh Paddle should arrive at the dam by 10AM and bring appropriate clothing, water, and perhaps a light snack. The plan is to leave the dam around 10:30AM and paddle out to the lake (about 1.6 miles one way), explore the floating bog a bit, and then return to the dam around 1PM, just in time for ice cream. The ice cream is free but donations are gratefully accepted!

We’d like to have an idea of how many people are planning to paddle so if you’re looking to participate, please let us know by emailing the secretary@clarylake.org.

(The photo at the top of this post shows a large portion of the great marsh from the air looking roughly southwest. The dam is near the upper right corner, Clary Lake is about a quarter mile off to the left and the Sennett Road is just off the right side. Photo by George Fergusson taken during a flight with pilot and lakeshore owner Terry Crummett, on July 10, 2022).

4th of July 2024

I think everyone would agree that this year’s fireworks display was excellent. Many thanks to those responsible for the show! I set up my camera and took dozens of photos, these are some of the ones that turned out the best. They were all taken from my shoreline, 3/4 of a mile away. When I get a chance I’ll upload some pictures of the boat parade, by all accounts it was the best parade yet 🙂

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