SHARON — Camp Downer counselors in yellow life vests stood up to their necks in the middle of the camp’s pond, pushing dense tangles of weeds to the shoreline on warm July morning.
“It’s really heavy,” counselor Lily Hankes of South Burlington, said. “And slimy.”
Counselors working this summer at Downer, which was once a 4-H camp and now acts as a non-profit, have time built into their schedules to help with cutting weedy aquatic plants choking the pond that the campers use for recreation.
Luke Burton, who also grew up attending Downer and now serves as its operation director, said that if the cleanup efforts weren’t underway this summer the pond would have been unusable.
“The whole thing would have transformed into a marsh,” Burton said.
Without proper attention, organic material like decomposing vegetation collects on the bottom of ponds and starts to fuel excess plant growth. Canoe paddles can’t easily cut through the water and fishing lines get tangled in stringy lily pads.
“All the weeds aren’t so healthy for the fish either,” Joyce Dion, Sharon resident and longtime volunteer at Downer, said.
Dion got involved with leading the charge for pond cleanup in the late 1990s.
In past cleanups, workers drove industrial-sized, diesel guzzling harvesting boats back and forth across the small pond to gather up plants like water shield and cow lilies once a year.
But Dion wanted a smaller, less intrusive operation this summer. After a five year harvesting hiatus, she hired Joel Bryan, of Vermont Ponds, to help out.
In a garage in Morristown, Vt., Bryan and his team built a small weed cutting boat with a quiet electric motor, which Bryan described as a “foldable, floating pontoon.”
Now the boat floats quietly in the 700-acre Downer State Forest on a pond constructed in the 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps, also known as the CCC. The CCC occupied Camp Downer before it was incorporated as a 4-H Camp through the University of Vermont Cooperative Extension program in the 1940s.
When 4-H ended its camping efforts, Downer struck out on its own, becoming a non-profit in the early 2000s. Today it continues to offer affordable overnight summer camp to children ages eight to 17, and hosts around 140 new campers each week.
As they navigate the pond in their boat, Bryan and his team are careful to avoid damaging the rare bladderwort plant that’s growing in some of the darker corners of the pond.
While one member of Bryan’s team steered the boat, another dipped a long pole with a blade like a hedge cutter on the end into the water. The blade cuts five foot swaths of weeds from the bottom of the pond, which then float to the surface where they’re gathered up by the counselors drifting behind in life jackets. Dion and other volunteers helped out from canoes.
Bryan imagines that he and his team could train camp workers to do this cleanup themselves.
“It could become just a light, every now and again kind of chore, like mowing the lawn,” he said.
Bryan uses a Bobcat to pull the cut weeds out of the water after they’ve been gathered at the shoreline. Then he loads the slick green bundle onto a cart attached to a four-wheeler and drags it out into the woods to a dumping site.
He hopes that it can be used as compost.
“At the very least if it stays out here in the woods it can grow happy trees,” Bryan said.
Frances Mize is a Report for America corps member. She can be reached at fmize@vnews.com or 603-727-3242.