Greetings Members and Friends of Clary Lake, from the Clary Lake Association Board! Here’s wishing you all a Merry Christmas and a very happy and healthy New Year… and more inclusively, Happy Holidays, or whatever and however you choose to celebrate this time of year.
It seems kinda silly now looking back on the post “10 December 2023: Bracing for a Big Storm” and all the concerns we had at that time about potential wind and rain damage after the absolute pounding the State of Maine took on Monday. On Monday they reportedly clocked winds at Pemaquid Point of 105 mph. That’s humming! The wind wasn’t that high here inland, but the wind was still terrifying and plenty strong enough to knock down trees the telephone poles (see above). You’ve no doubt seen the pictures of the Kennebec River overflowing it’s banks and flooding downtown Gardiner, Hallowell, and Augusta and other pictures and videos from around the State showing roads washed out or blocked with down trees and powerlines. We and most everyone else in Midcoast Maine lost power about 8 AM on Monday the 18th and for us here on the south side of Clary Lake, it didn’t return until about 3 PM Thursday afternoon thanks to the broken off pole (pictured above) just into Jefferson on Route 126 which delayed restoration efforts. At the time of this writing on Friday morning there are still 31,000 CMP customers without power, down from a half a million just a couple of days ago. Continue reading
The picture above shows Steve Cowles opening the gate in the Clary Lake dam in anticipation of a lot of rain: we’re in for a big storm later tonight and on through tomorrow with heavy rain and high winds. A few days ago it looked like we’d only be grazed by it but as it got closer, it got worse. Right now the prediction is for 50+ mile per hour winds and between 3 and 5 inches of rain. The worst wind is expected downeast. Flood warnings have been issued State-wide through Tuesday. Even with the gate and weir wide open (picture at left) and with the lake down over a foot, overtopping of the dam is likely. With partially frozen and totally saturated ground, runoff is expected to be substantial and because the wind is from the South, power outages are expected. That is not a wind direction trees in Maine are used to it. Continue reading
[UPDATE NO. 2] I did get out this morning and can confirm the lake is solidly frozen end to end and side to side. I suspect the open water I saw yesterday over by Duncan Road was due to seepage of 48° groundwater into the lake, it being enough to ward off freezing until last night’s single digit temps. Whether the ice survives next Monday’s warm rainstorm remains to be seen but for now, as of 8 December 2023, Clary Lake is officially frozen over.
[UPDATE] I’m sorry I didn’t go check the lake sooner or I’d have held off on posting this so-called news! There’s a small expanse of open water along the shoreline over in the cove by Duncan Road in front of the French, Vincentsen, and Duncan camps. So while the lake is 99.9999999% frozen over, it’s not 100% frozen over and the meteorological conditions necessary for ice-in have not been met. I’m calling it Almost Ice-in.
An overnight temperature of 9° degrees was enough for Clary Lake to completely freeze over. I’ve only checked the webcams so far, I’ll take a drive around the lake in a while and confirm it is completely frozen over and if it is, I will record today as the initial ice-in date. In any case, I wouldn’t venture out there on foot just yet! Give it a couple of more days and then tentatively test the thickness in various spots. You want a solid 3 inches to walk or skate on. Don’t be foolish.
It also wouldn’t surprise me if it opens up again before finally freezing over for the winter: it is supposed to warm up this weekend and Sunday through Monday a large warm weather system is going to blow through with strong southerly winds and heavy rains. It’s unlikely the ice we see today will survive that.
I woke up this morning to the first snow this fall on Clary Lake, and a short power outage, offering me an opportunity to test my generator (it worked fine). It sure looks like winter out there, but it’s pretty warm out. I expect this 2+” of new snow will not last. The lake is still open but there has been ice in the coves off and on this past week so it’s clearly getting ready. We’re just waiting for some sustained cold weather for it to freeze up once and for all. It’s going down into the low teens for a few days this week so there’s a good chance the lake will skim over if it remains calm overnight, but I think a solid freeze up is still a few weeks off. Now is the time to think about getting your skates sharpened and the ice boat ready! When there is ice suitable for skating or ice boating, you best be ready to go because it usually doesn’t last long before snow makes an appearance. Continue reading
I have archived the November 2023 water level chart (above, and at left). November is normally the wettest month of the year with average rainfall of 4.58 inches but this year we fell a little short, receiving only 3.24 inches of rain with most of it falling in the latter half of the month. However, we’ve already received 52.84 inches of precipitation this year so we’re way ahead of the average of 40.62 inches of rainfall for November. As it stands now, 2023 will be a record year for precipitation even if we don’t get any more rain (or snow) between now and the end of the year.
[UPDATE] We’re back in business, no thanks to our hosting provider’s technical support. Moving on.
Our website went down a little after Noon last Saturday for an unknown reason. Our hosting provider offered little help, much to my chagrin. I was able to finally bring it back up this morning after tweaking some essential files on the site. I still don’ t know what happened in the first place to take the site down. I initially considered the possibility that our site had been hacked but I have dismissed that possibility.
While the site is back up, it’s exceedingly slow with abysmal data transfer rates. I’m about to get back on the horn with Support to try and address this issue. In the meantime, until we’re in operating normally again, please be patient. You’re likely to get a 504 Gateway Timeout or simply a “This site took too long to respond” error. Just give it a moment and try again.
This is a repost of a message written by my wife Margaret, 3 years ago on Thanksgiving. At the time we were in the middle of a pandemic and it seems like life had simply been put on hold, and there was little to be thankful for. The pandemic is over thank goodness, but for many of us, times are still challenging, life is still challenging. I thought Margaret’s message was as good today as it was three years ago.
Everyday should be and is an opportunity to give thanks. During these challenging times, we can easily lose our footing in gratitude and only focus on what we don’t have, what we can’t do, and sadly for some of us, what we have lost. And so, we must remain steadfast in our work of living in the moment, taking nothing for granted and performing little acts of kindness. No earthly power can prevent us from living in this way.
May all of us, near and far, take a moment and remember what is truly important and know that it is found within. Happy Thanksgiving… now and always. Be kind and stay safe!
Margaret Fergusson
[November 2023] I’ve been working on this article about Total Phosphorus levels in Clary Lake for some time, another in our continuing education series, based on the premise that informed people make better Lake Stewards! The better we all understand lake science the better able we will be to protect and preserve our cherished natural resource. This article on Phosphorus in Clary Lake will be posted under Programs.
Phosphorus (P) is an element on the Periodic chart and it exists in nature in rocks and soil in various forms. P is crucial to all life forms and in small amounts it is a good thing, but as you’ve all learned by now, too much P can cause excessive algae growth resulting in harmful algal blooms. Consequently, an important part of our Water Quality Monitoring program is collecting data on the Total Phosphorus (TP) load in Clary Lake, and studying how it varies over time (TP is a measure of ALL the phosphorus found in a sample whether it is dissolved or in particulate form). We take 3 water samples for TP testing every season, and our 3rd and final TP test result for 2023 is back so this seems like good time to dig into this important topic. On September 22nd we took a 7 meter core water sample; it came back showing 0.017 mg/L of TP. I was actually expecting a higher figure in the mid to upper 20s and I’m glad I was wrong, but clearly it was high enough to fuel a moderate month-long algal bloom this fall with sightings of dead green algae collecting along the shore as early as late September and as recently as the end of October. The blessing if there is one is that it didn’t happen during the summer! Last year we had generally higher TP readings and a much more severe algal bloom that started around September 1st and didn’t burn itself out until late November. Other factors do contribute to produce algal blooms, but the presence of Phosphorus (P) in our lake is the single biggest cause. When we say algal blooms, we’re mainly talking about excessive growth of blue-green algae, more commonly known as Cyanobacteria. We’ll cover Cyanobacteria in depth at another time. Continue reading
A couple of our webcams were not accepting connections for live streaming for a while, but all 3 are working just fine now. Wondering what the conditions are on the lake right now? Take a look! When live streaming a camera, you can zoom in, go full screen, or take a picture and save it to your phone or computer. The picture above was taken while live streaming Clary_cam3. The webcam pictures update on the site every 20 minutes, but pictures are actually uploaded to the server every 4 minutes and they’re kept available for 3 days. You’ll find links to the archives on the Webcams page and on the individual camera pages.
We had our “Worst ever” bloom last fall.
From CentralMaine.com: Cobbossee Lake recently experienced its worst algae bloom since 2013, and experts are attributing it to this summer’s heavy rainfall.
Read the article:
Cobbossee Lake sees worst algae bloom in a decade
I posted this on Facebook and Instagram the other day with the caption “The first snow of the season is expected today. Y’all be careful out there!” and it received so much attention I decided to post it here too 🙂
I have archived the October 2023 water level chart (above, and at left). Rainfall for the month once again exceeded normal (a common refrain this year!) keeping the lake level higher than intended, at one point coming within almost an inch of the HWM with water flowing over the dam- unusual in October. By the end of the month however the lake was back down to 3/4 of a foot below the HWM which is about normal for this date. All told we received 5.36 inches of rain (normal is 4.45 inches) bringing us to 49.6 inches for the year, fully 13.6 inches above normal! Even if rainfall remains normal or below normal for the rest of the year, 2023 will still go down in the record book as an exceedingly wet year. We’ve seen greater-than-average rainfall in 7 of the first 10 months of 2023, and normally the wettest month of the year, November, is about to start. Continue reading
Last week I created a “Winter 2024” photo gallery and started adding pictures to it, but I’ve thought better of it. I mean winter’s coming, but it ain’t here yet so I’ve renamed the gallery “Fall 2023.” We don’t have a Fall gallery every year but this year we do. I’ll add a “Winter 2024” when the lake freezes over. Until then. it’s still fall.
In the process of shuffling files around I managed to lose the captions from the photographs. I’ll add them when I have a little spare time. The picture at left was taken at the dam, it shows dead blue-green algae flowing over the weir and out of the lake. Good riddance.
It’s official! We will be conducting a Watershed Survey this coming year, having recently received word that the Department of Environmental Protection has reserved a place for the Clary Lake Association in their 2024 Watershed Survey Program. DEP has staff and resources to handle 4 surveys per year and we were 5th on the list until someone ahead of us dropped out of the running, allowing us to move up one. We are thrilled to be moving forward with this most important project. This is not our first watershed survey, the picture at left is the actual Clary Lake watershed map developed for the 2001 watershed survey. The watershed map hasn’t changed but the 2001 survey was conducted 22 years ago and our watershed plan is outdated and obsolete, so practically speaking, the 2024 survey will be a new survey rather than simply an update of the old one. Continue reading
While it doesn’t appear quite as severe as last fall (at least not yet), this fall’s cyanobacteria algal bloom is gathering steam. This is not wholly unexpected: our last lake transparency reading was only 2.7 meters (8.8 feet) and there was quite a bit of green algae in suspension (see 2023 Water Quality Monitoring Season Comes to a Close) so I’m not really surprised to see this. The picture at left was sent to me yesterday afternoon by Danny Bell. Quite a shot! Apparently the aquatic growth helped keep the algae from drifting off. I went down to my shoreline and found only a thin greenish sheen of algae on the surface- nothing to compare with what Danny was seeing. The blue-green bacteria dies and floats to the surface where it’s moved around by wind and currents and in some places you’ll see quite a bit of green and in others much less or even none. Last year the bloom continued into early December. Hopefully this one will burn itself out soon. I will be sending a sample into DEP for testing.
This picture was sent to my wife this morning by Fran Marsh who was understandably concerned.
Please send me your observations and pictures!
On Friday afternoon, October 13th, Kelsie French and I wrapped up another season of water quality monitoring on Clary Lake. Started by my father Stuart Fergusson and David Hodsdon back in 1975, this marks the 48th year quality data data has been collected Clary Lake one of the longest monitored lakes in Maine. It’s not summer anymore and the last day on the lake is typically cold, raw, and windy. This one was no exception as the above picture of Kelsie French (getting an air temperature reading) suggests! The weather wasn’t near as bad as we’ve experienced before, not by a long shot. We do prefer days more like the picture at left, taken back in August.
We were a little late getting started this spring thanks to a bad cable on our YSI Pro 20 Dissolved Oxygen meter which we purchased new in 2013. The new cable cost $390 and didn’t arrive until early June. Consequently, our first data collection session on the lake wasn’t until June 11th. We usually like to start in late April or early May.
It isn’t simply cold weather that brings our water quality monitoring season to a close, it’s the fact the lake has “turned over” meaning the lake water is now thoroughly mixed from top to bottom. The lake basically goes into “rest” mode for the winter and most biologic activity winds down and becomes dormant for the winter. Soon the lake will freeze over (to learn more about that process, see this page on Ice Berms & Pressure Ridges). During Friday’s data collection session we observed surface dissolved oxygen and temperature readings of 8.5 mg/liter and 16.7°C (62°F) and near the bottom at 8 meters it was little different (8.4 mg/liter of dissolved oxygen and a temperature of 16.5° C). Once turnover happens in the fall, there is little reason to continue with water quality monitoring. The season is over. We’re still waiting on the results of our last Total Phosphorus test sample taken on September 22nd. I’ll post them on the Clary Lake Water Quality Monitoring data page when it arrives; I expect it will be higher than normal due to the fall turnover.
Transparency was the lowest we’ve seen it this year at only 2.70 meters (8.85 feet) with light obscuring particles of green algae quite evident in the water column. This was not surprising considering the fall turnover and the minor cyanobacteria bloom we’ve seen this fall. Compared to last year, what we’ve seen this fall is minor in deed.
While we stop measuring transparency and dissolved oxygen in the fall and winter, I will continue to monitor lake conductivity (chart at left) throughout the year. Conductivity is a reasonable proxy for lake productivity and as winter sets in, I expect conductivity will drop. As you can see on the chart at left, conductivity of water collected at the outlet (the blue line) peaked in mid-March with snowmelt runoff which undoubtedly included road salt, then dropped way down with the influx of heavy rainfall around the 1st of May. Since then it’s been gradually climbing indicating increasing lake productivity. Unlike in MY case, productivity in a lake environment is a bad thing! Interestingly, conductivity of a core sample of lake water has remained relatively stable throughout the year. The implication of this is that runoff entering the lake (and there was a lot of runoff…) doesn’t mix much with the full volume of water in the lake. This is not surprising when you think about it: the temperature stratification of the lake so evident in the summer clearly isn’t disrupted by rainfall and runoff as anyone who has gone swimming this summer is well aware. Mixing only occurs in early fall when the surface temp starts to drop. This mixing is evident by the relatively sharp rise in conductivity starting in early September.
I have archived the September 2023 water level chart (above, and at left). The rain we’ve come to expect this Summer just didn’t materialize last month with only 2.80 inches of rain falling (73% of normal) or a full inch less than the 3.84 inches we would normally receive in September. An obvious impact has been the gradual drop in water level. That said, who didn’t like the extended stretch of warm dry weather in September? Of the first 9 months of 2023, only 3 months had less than the normal amount of precipitation: September (73% of normal), March (67% or normal) and February (52% of normal). The month with the highest precipitation was July, with 8.2 inches (232% of normal) followed closely by January with 7.19 inches (225% of normal). Despite shortfalls in those three months, at the end of September we were still 12.65″ ahead of normal. To better grasp how big a differential that is consider that our average annual rainfall is 44.06 inches, and we’re already there- we’ve already received more than that. Even if we were to receive NO MORE rain or snow for the REST OF THE YEAR, we’d still end up a hair above normal annual rainfall. That is how far above normal precipitation we are this year. The overall precipitation statistics for 2023 are impressive. You’ll find all kinds of data and charts on the Precipitation sheet of our Clary Lake Dam Operation Log. Continue reading
The lake has gone through its Fall Turnover meaning the temperature stratification that was a summertime feature of the lake has broken down and the lake water has mixed pretty much from top to bottom. The high winds from the remnants of Hurricane Lee last a week ago Saturday certainly helped with the mixing! Kelsie French and I were out doing our biweekly water quality monitoring last Friday and the water temperature at the surface (21.5°C) was only 2.5°C warmer than the water 8m (26ft) down. Two weeks ago the temperature difference from top to bottom was 7.8°C.
That turnover resulted in Phosphorus-rich water at the bottom of the lake mixing with the upper sunlit layers, giving a shot of nutrients to the cyanobacteria living there. A week later, they’re beginning to die off and float to the surface resulting in that telltale green scum on the water surface. The picture at left was sent to me by Jack Holland. Yesterday morning the green stuff was fairly evident over much of the lake surface (featured image, above), thanks to the lack of wind. It quickly dissipated when the wind picked up.
While no algae bloom is a good thing, as blooms go this one is pretty mild and it was expected. Hopefully it won’t get much worse. Last fall you may recall we experienced a much worse bloom, way more intense and widespread that went on for 3 months, extending all the way through November. It is likely all the rain we had this summer and the resulting flushing action that kept our water quality so high for so long.
This dock has found a new home.
Cheryl Willis is getting rid of her dock and a couple of ramps, free for the taking (pictured at left). The dock used to belong to Tim & Brenda Robbins, she bought their place about a year ago. For those of you who don’t know where that is, it’s two places north of the State boat launch down at the east end of the lake. If you want the dock, go get it!
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