CHESTERVILLE – “I wasn’t exaggerating, was I?” said Robert Pachucki, leaning forward in his rowboat and heaving the oars out of Horseshoe Pond.
Rising from the surface they looked startlingly like spaghetti tongs, dripping with long strands of fuzzy green weed.
“It’s a lot of fun to go rowing out here now,” he yelled again, obviously sarcastic, as the boat approached the shore. Securing it, he tramped through the yard and into the home he and wife, Mia, bought five years ago for their retirement.
Perched at the edge of the pond, with its own dock and plenty of recreation right out the door, the house was like a slice of paradise for the couple, Mia Pachucki said Tuesday.
But now, depressed by the aquatic bladderwort that chokes the pond so badly that swimming, boating and fishing are nearly impossible, they’re planning on moving and are in the process of building a house in Farmington.
“You know, we thought we were going to retire and be out on the lake every day,” she said, seated in her living room and surveying the pond from a big picture window. Bladderwort mats were visible every time the wind died down for a moment, thick and green, covering the lake surface.
“It just destroyed our dream,” she said.
Bladderwort is native to Maine and has existed in local ponds for ages, said John McPhedran, a biologist and coordinator of the Maine Department of Environmental Protection’s invasive aquatic species program.
Large concentrations of plants like bladderwort are common in some bodies of water all over the state, McPhedran said. Even more common is the type of fluctuating levels of a plant in a pond over a number of seasons, he said.
“Anecdotally, there might be some typical (change in) growth for these plants,” he said. Changes in water temperature and sedimentation, or even especially bad storms can make a lake ideal for plant growth in some years, while decreasing growth in other years.
Whether the recent surge of bladderwort inhabiting Horseshoe Pond is natural or not matters little to the Pachuckis, who bought the property when the pond was still a vibrant, busy place, full of people fishing, boating and swimming.
This year, he rarely sees people out on the lake. The people who own the camp next door and come out a few weeks every summer left on their third day, he said. He worries property values will decline. He worries an unsuspecting child will get caught in the weeds and drown.
He went to the DEP to see if they could do anything, but came up against a policy barring the use of herbicides on native plants. The law also severely restricts the use of herbicides on invasive species like Eurasian water-milfoil and hydrilla.
McPhedran pointed out that native weeds serve a function.
“Native plants are an integral part of our pond communities,” he said. “They stabilize the shoreline, they provide habitat for critters, they help prevent erosion around the shoreline, and they provide a habitat for macro invertebrates.”
“If you use herbicides, you are not only killing native plants but indirectly killing organisms that rely on those plants, too.”
So, for now, the Pachuckis continue working on their house in Farmington. They take their boat out rarely and, when they do, are forced to turn back before getting far, the engine clogged with weeds.
Horseshoe Pond sits quiet, covered in a green blanket of bladderwort, thick and springy. Its docks float mostly empty and its waters lie relatively still. The fish and loons are the only ones swimming there, now.
Comments are no longer available on this story