This commentary is by David L. Deen of Westminster, a trustee of the Connecticut River Conservancy, a member of Trout Unlimited, and a member of the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Board.
The Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation is about to promulgate a rule that will set out for the first time the area and depth bounds of a lake upon which anyone may operate a wake boat.
These boats are not new, but their use on Vermont lakes has ballooned and shows every sign of continued growth. There is some good news and some bad news in this proposed rule but first, for those who are not acquainted with them: What the heck is a wake boat?
A wake boat is a power craft designed to create large wakes that allow for surfing behind the boat without needing a tow rope. Surfers just surf the wake.
A wake boat “plows” through the water with its bow up, an orientation that mimics a slow-moving powerboat that creates a larger wake than a boat that has planed off. The wake boat maintains its bow-up posture while reaching surfing speeds, using big engines and even bigger ballast tanks in the stern of the boat.
Wake-surfing waves are 2.5 times larger and have five to nine times the peak power of conventional waterskiing waves. A 2014 Montreal study reported that, to protect shorelines from this heavier wave action, wake boats need to operate at least 984 feet from shore.
The bad news in the proposed rule is that the Department of Environmental Conservation would require only a meager indefensible 500-foot distance from shore to operate.
Unlike the traditionally designed powerboat that thrusts its propwash directly astern, the plowing design — the bow-up, stern-down orientation of a wake boat — thrusts propwash downward with power equivalent to a Mack truck that roils the bottom and uproots plants at depths of 20 feet or more.
This roiling of a lake bottom with a history of nutrient loading — and all our lakes have such a history — releases legacy phosphorus that has lain on the bottom into the water column, adding food for accelerated plant growth and possible toxic algae blooms.
Our lake bottoms hold legacy deposits of phosphorus because of excessive fertilizer runoff and the very life cycle of aquatic plants. When aquatic plants die, they drift to the bottom and rot, either with or without oxygen, but the various plant parts chemically change to other benign substances — except for the phosphorus.
When the plant rots around it, the phosphorus tends to go back to its inorganic state, and that is the state plants use to fuel their growth. Phosphorus will stay inactive and unused, if left alone buried in the lake substrate, but when propwash stirs up the bottom, that pent-up concentration of phosphorus goes back into the water column to feed blue-green algae and accelerate plant growth.
A more immediate impact from the powerful downward thrust of the propwash occurs in the littoral zone, the food-producing shallow and close-to-shore heart of any lake. These shallower regions are the nursery of all that lives in our lakes and ponds — home to juvenile fish, mayflies, dragonflies, and other macroinvertebrates critical to the aquatic food chain.
Wake boat propwash operating in less than 20 feet of water disturbs and/or buries this fragile critical habitat.
But here is some of the good news in the proposed rules; the rule would disallow wake boats in shallow smaller lakes completely, and in large, deeper lakes allow their operation only where the water depth was greater than 20 feet.
The Department of Environmental Conservation began developing the rule to control the negative impacts of wake boats when a citizen petition — brought to it by the on-lake residents of Responsible Wakes for Vermont Lakes — gave voice to their concern that wake boats are not healthy for small or shallow lakes. The department has pretty much agreed with them and has set out a rule that serves our lakes well — except for the ineffective separation distance to shore of less than 1,000 feet.
Sign up for the in-person public hearing Aug. 1 from 5 to 7:30 p.m. at the Pavilion Auditorium, 109 State St., Montpelier, to give your two- minute statement. More info is available here, or email your comments to Vermont DEC at anr.wsmdlakes@vermont.gov before the Aug. 10 public comment period ends.
After thanking them for proposing this rule, ask them to support the Responsible Wakes for Vermont Lakes petition as submitted, requiring that a wake boat operate at least 1,000 feet from shore to both protect our lakes from excessive shore erosion and to defend the lifegiving littoral zone.
