Lakes Committee hears about drawdown
The lake drawdowns are proceeding on schedule, Lakes and Fisheries superintendent Rick Echols told members of the lakes committee at their monthly meeting last week. They should be ready to refill, beginning on Feb. 15.
Both Lakes Avalon and Loch Lomond were lowered to allow work along the shoreline this winter. Lake Avalon is the site of a new swim beach and general manager Tom Judson said work on the area that will be underwater is complete. POA crews cleared underbrush and boulders from the far west end of Avalon and spread a coarse sand in the area where swimmers will wade into the lake. A finer sand will be spread over the actual beach site, he said.
Board member John Nuttall, a liaison to the committee, said that several docks around the lake have ongoing construction projects.
While the lake will begin to refill in mid-February, the water may come up slowly, so work on docks can continue. The lakes are refilled with rainwater, so the time it takes can vary.
Loch Lomond is on the same schedule, although the POA doesn’t have any big projects going on there. Lomond was lowered so homeowners could work on their own docks.
The committee also considered new fishing tournament rules that Echols wants to send to the board of directors for approval. He said the changes have been made to allow kayak fishing tournaments on the smaller lakes. In the past, tournaments were limited to Lakes Lomond, Windsor and Avalon.
Also, he wants to limit the amount of time fish spend out of the water during catch and release tournaments. Sometimes, he explained, fish that are alive when released die within a few days due to the stress of being out of the water. But anglers want to have a weigh in to end each tournament, and that means the fish have to be transported to a central spot in a live well and then carried to the scale. Echols’ regulations are designed to limit the time anglers wait in line at the scales.