Casitas May Let Some Boats Return

By Daryl Kelley
A week after directors of Lake Casitas closed one of the nation's premier fisheries to outside boats for up to a year, that same board struggled Wednesday with ways to begin letting some boats back into the lake without allowing a potential infestation of a destructive mussel.
The directors seemed to be seriously considering an idea floated by anglers at last week's hearing on closure: Allowing boaters who only fish at Lake Casitas to continue to use the lake, by placing a security lock on their craft so inspectors could see if it had been used anywhere else.
A second proposal to create greater access to the lake during the ban on outside boats was also discussed by the board, which seemed to favor a staff proposal to greatly expand the lake's boat storage area, so local fishermen could leave their boats there for a fee and continue to fish after a 10-day quarantine proves them dry and clean.
“These are some good ideas, quite frankly, from people who use only Lake Casitas,” said Steve Wickstrum, general manager of the Oak View-based Casitas Municipal Water District, which manages the lake. “We'll try to keep our risk at zero and allow recreation to continue for folks who use only Lake Casitas.”
“I'm glad we're moving forward,” said Board President Jim Word.
Before the ban on outside boats, the directors had feared that the pernicious and damaging quagga mussel, discovered in Southern California lakes last year, could hitchhike aboard fishing boats from infected lakes to Lake Casitas, the main water supply for the Ojai Valley and western Ventura. Infestation would cost many millions of dollars to combat, officials estimated, and they said there is no proven way to eradicate the alien mussel. A single female quagga mussel can produce a million offspring a year, resulting in a mass of mussels so dense they clog waterworks and undercut the natural ecosystem, killing fish and other aquatic life.
Casitas directors set a hearing for March 26 to further discuss the mussel issue, and to “tweak” the resolution they approved last week, banning outside boats while still allowing anglers to rent boats at Lake Casitas or to store their craft there for $80 a month if there is space.
On Wednesday, two avid bass fishermen raised the issue of safety locks again, presenting to the board a wide array of materials on tamper-proof locks that could guarantee that boats whose owners swear they use them only at the huge local reservoir don't sneak in a visit elsewhere.
“With this procedure you are guaranteed 100 percent that you will not get the mussels,” said fisherman Larry Elshere of Ojai. “It's impossible. We're all against the mussels.”
Which prompted praise from the board: “This is the kind of cooperation we're looking for,” said Director Pete Kaiser.
Another fisherman, Doug Hanson of Camarillo, proposed that the board also investigate the feasibility of creating a “Lake Casitas Coalition of Clean Lakes,” which would include lakes around the state that have not been infested by mussels.
Those lakes, including nearby Lake Cachuma in Santa Barbara County, could work together by banning boats from their lakes that did not have safety locks or which had been in infested lakes, he said.
The coalition of clean lakes could cooperate fully to ensure that no boat that was not secured could enter any of the clean reservoirs. That would leave lakes open to responsible boaters, Hanson said.
“If you bring this to sister lakes, it's a concept that could go across the state,” he said.
The board seemed intrigued by the idea, or at least a variant of it, possiblity including Lake Cachuma in its safety lock program, if Santa Barbara County supervisors ban outside boats at a hearing set for late this month.
“I'm glad you guys are getting together on this,” said director Russ Baggerly, who spotlighted the quagga threat to Lake Casitas last year.
Baggerly asked Hanson if it wasn't odd that the clean lakes, especially Casitas, have had to lead the campaign against the spread of mussels, while the state Department of Fish and Game has allowed infested lakes to stay open to fishing. “Isn't this backward?” Baggerly asked.
“It is odd,” Hanson agreed.
State officials have said they think mussel spread is not such a threat that it requires the closure of lakes, and that thorough inspection before entry is sufficient..
Baggerly added in an interview: “Lots of potential solutions are coming to the surface now due to the pressure we've put on the state and the boating community (by banning outside boats). People are actually starting to think about this seriously. The pressure finally got their attention.”
In a report to the board, Brian Roney, recreation director at Casitas, said that he and other lake operators spoke with fish and game Fisheries Director Terry Foreman last week about what the state could do to staunch the spread of quaggas, and a sister zebra mussel, discovered recently in Northern California.
Roney said the lake operators agreed that the state should immediately ban all bass tournaments at infected lakes, require infected lakes to decontaminate all departing boats, develop uniform boat inspection protocols and reconsider a boat tracking system so operators would know which boats have visited infested lakes.
The board asked Wickstrum to incorporate Roney's suggestions with others from Baggerly and other directors and send them to the Department of Fish and Game and other agencies that could work together to stop the spread of mussels.
Closer to home, the board dealt with appeals from lake users who thought they'd been caught in a bureaucratic Catch-22 when the lake closed.
Fisherman Tom Hutchinson said he rented a boat slip at Lake Casitas last Wednesday, the day after the ban on outside boats only to find that he was not allowed to bring his boat into the lake to use the slip. Hutchinson noted that the boat ban resolution allowed for such storage after a 10-day quarantine. But Wickstrum said there was some ambiguity in the resolution, and the district's lawyer, John Mathews, said the language needed to be clarified at the March 26 meeting.
Finally, after board members empathized with Hutchinson, Wickstrum relented, allowing the angler to bring his boat to Casitas Thursday morning to begin the quarantine.
The board also heard a request from Walter Stowe of Ventura, who asked to set up a storage facility at the lake for inflatable tubes.
Roney said about 125 tubers use the lake.
“It's one more element we will consider,” said Word.
Director Kaiser said the board had just begun a process to find a solution to the mussel threat, while still providing recreational opportunities.
“This type of innovation is how we're going to succeed,” he said. “The board is going to work the best we can to keep our lake clean and to work with you folks.”
Director Hicks, who voted against the one-year ban to outside boats, favoring a 60-day closure, pressed his colleagues for a set of criteria that, once achieved, would prompt reopening the lake.
“We need to decide what it's going to take,” Hicks said.
Since the quagga mussel threat surfaced last year in San Diego and Riverside counties, the district has been checking boats for water or vegetation that could carry the mussel's microscopic larvae and asking boat operators if their craft have been in infested lakes and excluding those that had.
Casitas directors imposed the boat inspections in mid-November, and officials said 158 of about 2,800 screened boats have been excluded, usually because they still carried water from other lakes.
In a series of recent meetings, dozens of boaters have cited the economic harm of a ban since Casitas is a premier bass fishing lake. District staffers have estimated such a ban would cost the water agency more than $600,000 a year in recreation revenue while also hurting nearby businesses.
At last week's hearing, Elshere said he'd conducted an informal survey of businesses, and found that they would lose about $1.8 million a year.
Repeatedly, fishermen have said there is no evidence that the mussels have been transported by boats in California. State officials say the mussels have infested eight Southern California lakes through a series of aqueducts, not by boats, although the initial infestation in Lake Mead was apparently from a houseboat moved from the Great Lakes area.
Some community members who asked for an immediate ban, cited the billions of dollars agencies have spent in the Great Lakes region since 1988 to combat the invasive zebra mussel, which apparently migrated to the United States aboard freighters from the Ukraine.
Three weeks ago, the Casitas board asked Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to declare a statewide emergency because of the mussel infestation, so California could qualify for federal emergency money to fight it.
One large utility in the East Bay of San Francisco responded by banning any boat from Southern California or outside the state from its reservoirs. That move came in late January after a zebra mussel was discovered near Gilroy in San Benito County, just south of the Bay Area.
It was also the first zebra mussel found in the western United States, officials said.
The quagga mussel's migration northward, after it was discovered at Lake Mead and Lake Havasu 14 months ago, has occurred in the sprawling canal system of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.