Summer Aquatic Invasive Species Boat Landing Tour

This summer, our conservation coordinator, Nichole, and our project technician, Ryan, have traveled across the UP to bring awareness to Aquatic Invasive Species (AIS), how you can prevent the spread of them through cleaning, draining, and drying equipment that contacts water. AIS spreads pretty easily and even if you only recreate on one body of water it is a best practice to still clean off equipment to not only demonstrate this to other recreators but its a good practice to get into and preserves the life of equipment. 

We started our tour at Detour State Harbor on the Lake Huron watershed with MSUE. They accompanied us for 3 days where the last 2 were spent at Bay Mills along with the Bay Mills Indian Community.  Weather was pretty rainy off and on so the turn out was a little low but we kept at it. We got to talk to a lot of people and give away some free swag like we did for each event following. It was a good opener to the season with 3 boats washed total.

Then, we hosted an event at Lake Gogebic which started out rainy but ended up being the most beautiful weather. Lake Gogebic is in the Superior watershed. We had a little over a 10% increase in turn out for this one and had 3 boats washed that day. WePIC did such a good job of catching everyone that came by to talk to and a lot of happy people from some give away prizes. 

Twin Lakes was next and we had some kids activities planned since we were so close to the campground. KISMA partners showed up to help and educate the public with us on AIS and did so good we have people considering joining the natural resource career field! Kids activities included a casting contest where washers were tied on the end of fishing poles for the kids to try to cast inside a 5 gal. bucket & a coloring contest with prizes from UPRCD and Twin Lakes DNR staff. Our swag for this event was cleaned out by eager children looking to have water bottles, key floats, backpacks etc. We had another 10% increase in visitors from the last event and outreach was getting better and better, not to mention it was the first "perfect" day for an event. 

At Cedar River Harbor, we hosted the next event with WRISC. Storms rolled in around 2PM but for a 6 hour event we saw a 50% (!!) increase in outreach efforts since the last event at Twin Lakes! We didn't have a boat wash for this event but we got to educate kayakers, tourists and locals. We actually had the unique opportunity to tour the DNR lake sturgeon hatchery while we were in the area and learn about some fisheries facts!

We just hosted another event this last Friday with Lake to Lake CISMA at Little Lake campground. Once again eager kids were happy to get some free swag and give away outreach items. With the weather being pretty poor for boating with wind and rain commonly experienced for the last few days we had a lower turn out but comparable to events in the beginning. We had a boater come off the water and he had a lot of vegetation on his anchor. We were able to identify it was native fern-leaf pondweed and educated him on some AIS to look out for. It was fun seeing native plants instead of AIS on that boat and we are glad for it. Lake to Lake crew did a quick kayak survey before some rain and we learned about decontamination techniques for kayaking and small watercraft. 

AND. 

We have two more events before Summer ends! These events will be tomorrow, August 16th and August 17th at Raber Bay Boat Launch with our partners from Three Shores CISMA. If you want to be a part of the fun, free swag and potential for our outreach giveaway then head out there from 8-4 (weather dependent). 

*We plan to put an update of the last events here once they are completed.