The stinkin' truth on the lake

[Spiel]

The stinkin' truth on the lake

 

 

February 15, 2009

Matt Crawford / burlingtonfreepress.com

 

 

If you missed it last week, noted travel writer Peter Greenberg did a little dissin' on Lake Champlain.

 

Greenberg put the entire lake on his "must-miss" list of travel destinations in his best-selling book, "Don't Go There!: The Travel Detective's Essential Guide to the Must-Miss Places of the World."

 

Of our big lake he advised travelers to "bring a haz-mat suit along" if they came a-visiting Lake Champlain.

 

You're free, of course, to characterize Greenberg and his claim any way you want, but Greenberg in no fool. He is the travel editor for NBC's "Today Show," CNBC and MSNBC, a best-selling author and host of the nationally syndicated "Peter Greenberg Worldwide Radio Show." He is also a contributing editor to Men's Health and Forbes.

 

OK, maybe his comments are a little over-the-top, perhaps designed to garner some attention for his book rather than to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but you have to admit, Lake Champlain seems more like a cesspool than a pristine place these days, and the chance for improvements coming on any front seem slim to none.

 

Greenberg wrote, "The water often looks cloudy and green and smells foul, due to algae blooms, and the depletion of the lake oxygen has affected fish." If you've ever spent time fishing on Lake Champlain, you know he hit that nail square on the head.

 

Environmental groups and the governor's office have used Greenberg's comments to kindle an entertaining war of words about Lake Champlain's health. The Governor's Office seemed insulted and shocked (shocked!) by Greenberg's observations even though they are almost entirely in line with what we heard from Quebec's environmental minister a few years ago when he declared Missisquoi Bay an environmental "disaster."

 

If asked, I'm betting those of us who ply the big lake's waters for fish would be more than willing to attest that severe, dramatic environmental changes have occurred and the well-being of the big lake seems much more precarious than it did even a decade ago. And if you really pressured average Lake Champlain anglers for a response, they'd probably tell you that the entire lot of government entities, environmental groups, citizen coalitions and well-intentioned souls who have tried to "fix" the ills of the big lake haven't amounted to a bucket of bullpout slime.

 

Is Champlain a disaster? Well, maybe not yet, but if we use Champlain's fish populations as our litmus test, something is surely amiss. And it does seem to be getting worse.

 

When we fish Lake Champlain these days we don't wear haz-mat suits, that'd just be silly. We have, however, adjusted how we fish -- learning to look for largemouths in the big weeds of milfoil, learning what super lines are available to resist abrasion when we're casting in among the zebra mussels. We know now where to look for white perch (an invasive) and know how salmon and other fish are turning on to (invasive) alewives. We are all far too familiar with nuisance species such as lamprey, which are affecting virtually every fish population in the big lake and we've seen massive fish die-offs that come from oxygen grabs.

 

We catch pike with these huge, ugly growths (lymphosarcoma) and we're bracing for the arrival of the fish-killing VHS disease, which, we've been glumly assured, will be here before you know it.

 

The fishing can be good -- no doubt about it -- but there's a strange feel on Lake Champlain these days, as if nature is seriously whacked and careening in the wrong direction from which there will be no return.

 

I have no idea whether Greenberg is a fisherman, but as far a truth-sayer? Well, he ain't far off.

 

 

Matt Crawford is the former Free Press outdoors editor.