Excessive Weed Growth this year

Has anyone else noticed more aquatic submergent vegetation (weeds) in the lakes they fish?

I have noticed a lot more algae and weed in the local stripper pits this year.

I wonder if it's because we have been having much warmer winters and the weeds are not dying off as much.

I know a few years ago we had ice covering the strip pits I fish at Blue Grass Fish and Wildlife Area and maybe that helped to block the sunlight and led to the death of the weeds.

This past winter I don't know if we had any ice on the lake of if there was some ice it was not there very long and not very thick.

Normally it takes a lot of ice and snow cover to limit the sunlight getting to the weeds under water.

BGFWA has very turbid water. There is a lot of floating material in the water. Not sure exactly what in the water. But some of it appears to be broken plant material. These waters are pretty fertile and are full of eurasian milfoil plants. These exotic plants take over a water body pretty good. That makes it hard to pull a bait though the water without getting some plant material on the bait.

According to some of the past fishery biologist reports for this body of water the biologists recommended that the lakes be treated to control the excessive weed growth. Evidently the property managers have not budget to get this weed control project started.

Also they DNR rates the bank fishing accessibility as excellent. while some spots have good access to the water most of the banks are covered with cattail on the bank and that makes fishing much harder. With the cattails covering the banks at the water's edge it makes it hard to fish from the banks. And with the aquatic vegetation growing from the edge of the lake out about 10 to 20ft from the shoreline it makes fishing tough using artificial lures. Now a boat can fish the weedlines from the water side but they will still have to be careful as to what baits they use to fish with.

A good way to fish these lakes as they are now is with a small boat or a float tube and fish parallel to the weedlines. For crappie it might be better to fish one or two casts out away from the weed line and out over deeper water. This is where the small bass and crappie will spend a lot of the time in the midday during the hot summer months. They will often suspend out over the deeper water near a feeding shelf. These fish can be found resting right above the thermocline or oxycline. Some times the thermocline will be above the oxycline. I saw on the Corp of Engineers web site for Patoka lake that this was the case. The thermocline was around 15 ft and the oxycline was at 17 to 18 ft. The DO content didn't get below 5ppm until you got down below 18 ft deep. This was based on data they collected near the **** on the main lake out over deeper water this past week.

Regards,

Moose1am