The aquatic weed harvesters are used for establishing things like navigation lanes and clearing out areas of varied plant growth, like impacted boating or swimming areas and the weed harvester can remove a lot of plant material.  Alternatives would be more time consuming and expensive!

Funding for the 18-year old program is now in question as concerns were raised whether the harvesters are contributing to the spread of Eurasian watermilfoil by fragmentation in Lake Champlain.

However, an environmental analyst with the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation said that there’s no hard scientific evidence outside of anecdotal observation to suggest that harvesting is causing the spread of the milfoil.  There are no data sets to answer whether the two lake weed harvesters are the major spreaders of the invasive plant species when there is plenty of boat traffic making waves and cutting through the invasive vegetation.

I fondly remember sitting on the pier with my brother; toes just skimming the top of the water’s surface; watching the weed harvester cut the mats of weeds growing along the surface knowing that the swimming and fishing were going to be so much better when the operator was finished.

I grew up on Potter’s Lake, a relatively small lake in Southeastern Wisconsin. Little did I know that I would not only work for the company that produced the weed eating machine I used to watch, but that one of my co-workers grew up on the same lake watching an Aquarius Systems harvester cut and collect plant material.

Chad, Aquarius Systems’ customer relations manager, recently visited our customers on Potter’s Lake and sent a photo of the aquatic weed harvester. When I mentioned to Chad that I used to watch that weed harvester, but recall it being all blue (the photo he sent showed a weed harvester with a stainless-steel barge) he thought I was “stealing his story” about watching the harvester as a child. What a small world! Chad also grew up on Potters Lake and spent time watching the weed harvester as well.

Of course, after a little digging through our archives (yup, we have a room dedicated to all the equipment we produced) we discovered that while we both watched an Aquarius Systems’ aquatic weed harvester operate on the lake they were in fact different machines.

The machine I watched was purchased in 1976 and was indeed all Aquarius Blue; my memory was correct. Potter’s Lake Protection and Rehabilitation District traded up in 1985 to the machine that they are still operating today, over 36 years later!