Mussels and ballast

So, as of now I am a level 2 ANS tech. That does not mean alot, due to the fact that no one can get an inter agencie agreement on anything. But what that does mean is I can help with any questions about inspections.
First off I want to say a few things.
One, thanks, to all of us(you) wakeboarders. It is AMAZING how dirty ALOT of non wake boats are. So thanks for taking pride in your vessel.
Second, It sucks that our sport needs ballast, and ballast is how theese bastards(mussels) got here. It is true that most(at least Colorado Parks and NPS) ans checks are red flagged by wake boats with ballast. Not much else I have to say about that yet.
And finaly with the above statment about ballast, it WAS NOT a wake qboat that got turned away on saturday for likely loung mussels ALL over his gross, dirty boat.
So if any one has questions about any of this stuff let me know.

How long do we have until the feds ban ballast in boats?

One of our power plant lakes has zebra mussel's bad and it barely see's a fishing boat and never wake boats.
Those things are just taking over.

the problem is not ballast, it is UNVERRIFYABLE ballast. IF we can see in your hard tank, or see empty bags, its all good. But when there are hard tanks built under the floor it is nearly impossible to check how much water is left in each tank it is an issue. The first company to incopetate ballast that is inspectable will have amead huge start. One of the major companies is working with Colorados lead inspector on a filtration system. I have a few of my own ideas that I want to play with this summer.
Glad I am too poor to have under floor ballast.

There are alot of i/o's that have under floor ballast as well.And that number will keep growing .

Originally Posted by epic1

the problem is not ballast, it is UNVERRIFYABLE ballast. IF we can see in your hard tank, or see empty bags, its all good. But when there are hard tanks built under the floor it is nearly impossible to check how much water is left in each tank it is an issue. The first company to incopetate ballast that is inspectable will have amead huge start. One of the major companies is working with Colorados lead inspector on a filtration system. I have a few of my own ideas that I want to play with this summer.
Glad I am too poor to have under floor ballast.

My last boat had bags for the ballast system, and there was NO WAY to completely get all of the water out of them. Doesn't this cause the same problems as having hard tanks? I heard the mussels can live in hot conditions, and outside the water for days, just like an emptied bag that still has some form of residual water in it. This is similar to how a hard tank would be after drained out.

Can you explain the difference?

Quite frankly why single out ballast when there are other more prolific means for them to spread.

You mentioned filtration system...is a strainer good enough or does it need to be a certain micron rating or something?

http://www.ehow.com/how_6150929_kill-zebra-mussels.html

I think we've got zebra mussels in our little 140+ acre lake.... and the general consensus is that someone with a "competition" FISHING boat (lol.. not all of us skiers and wakeboarders) brought them in. Here's a pic of one of my neighbor's dock wheels:

I wish there was a good way of killing them without killing all the fish in the lake, too....

are they tasty?

too small to eat.
The filter is a crazy small micron to get all the velliger stage mussels(larval stage). That is what is holding it up. No one likes slow flow. I feel that is not the way to go, slow fill, and would need to be cleaned ALOT.
You are right, in the right condition a bag can not be emptied all the way either. Typicaly, bags are easy to see, touch and verrify that there is a SMALL amount of water left. But that is not allways true.
There are other ways to transfer ANS, true. But most of those ways(engine cooling systems, live wells, bilges) are easier to see that there is a limited amount of standing water.

The most common Decon that we do is Live aquatic bait. We must rince the bait and container and use distled or local water. So ballast is not being picked on alone.

It just takes a while to fill ballast with 140 degree water, then let that water cool enough so we do not do damage to your balast pumps. It just takes time.

on saturday a 2000's ish x star came in for the first time this year. Had I not been there, it would have been a decon for sure. Two of his tanks were hard and carpeted, so we could not PROVE they were empty. My supervisor wanted to send him for decon, BUT, we could vefrify that his center tank was empty(locker sack) so he came in under the set amount of standing water for decon.
Had I not been there, no one would have tryed to verify the third tank.
ITs all flowcharts and min allowable amounts of standing water. It is far from perfect.

I am trying to push for more Wake and ballast training for inspectors to make life easier on every one. Budgets might take my job before too long though.

Honestly if everyone just came to the same system and had a state wide tag sayig the boat had only been on lakes with this sytem then it would be fine. If you broke the tag you'd have to go through a quarantine period again. Standley lake does it, and as much as I hate it, their system is light years better for protecting the lake than any other in colorado.

Originally Posted by cjh1669

Honestly if everyone just came to the same system and had a state wide tag sayig the boat had only been on lakes with this sytem then it would be fine. If you broke the tag you'd have to go through a quarantine period again. Standley lake does it, and as much as I hate it, their system is light years better for protecting the lake than any other in colorado.

That would help a bunch for sure.
I read chlorine kills them too, almost instantly. Seems to me one could chlorinate and neutralize the residual water easier than trying to get 3 tanks with enough 140 deg+ water in them.
Another help would be more guys like epic1 Chris that have a clue about boats actually doing the inspections and decon instead of some $7/hr tool or a Park Ranger that have no idea what they're doing with ballast systems.
Only took me one decon trip and the ranger saying "If you only had 2 tanks we wouldn't have to decon you because you'd be below the allowable calculated residual water amount." to figure out that if I said I had 2 tanks I'd be free to go. After an hour of him scalding himself and getting soaked trying to get my 3 tanks to have adequate water in them, I ran water only to one tank and then back out each time telling him it was a different tank, or we would have been there 3 hours!

Please don't misconstrue that I am polluting the lakes with ANS because I'm not. I know where my boat has been and how long it's sat between trips, so I just have to be creative to not waste half of my hard earned day off at the ^(&**&^%ing decon station!

About eating them

My ski & wakeboard club leases a 45 acre gravel pit next to a swim hole pay lake that has been around for 50 years. The Waterbowl has been run by hippies for 15 years now. A few years ago we kept seeing hundreds of cracked open shells on our boat docks. We kept cleaning the docks off, but the next day they would be back. It turns out that the hippy rug rats were chowing down. Just thinking about it still grosses me out! Gotta love the Waterbowl

Lake Erie had them a decade ago bad. 3ft piles on the shoreline and everyone had to wear watershoes. They eventually die of starvation after they eat everything. only good thing is it really cleaned up the water.

It sounds like its just a matter of time before the attempt to control them fails.

Originally Posted by sailing216

They eventually die of starvation after they eat everything. only good thing is it really cleaned up the water.

Sounds like we might be messing with nature's equivalent to a pool "shock" treatment.

Can these things live in salt or brackish water? I wonder if there really isn't any way to stop them. I mean, like Tim says it's just a matter of time before most major bodies of water they can live in will be infested. Preventative measures, checks, cleanings, etc will likely only slow them down. All it takes is one person who either doesn't know better or doesn't care and an infestation can start. My understanding is there's no way to rid a body of water of them.

Interesting if they will starve themselves though after long enough, and perhaps settle into a lower level of infestation where the natural wildlife will not go extinct in that lake?

First, I have read about several people purposefully transplanting these critters from Lake Mead to Lake Powell in the name of George Hayduke ala Edward Abby. They profess that since Lake Powell is an artificial ecosystem it is perfectly acceptable to introduce this destructive species in order to eventually remove the damn.

Second, the real damage isn't from the shells themselves, but from all secondary effects. In Lake Michigan all sorts of crazy things are happening. There are huge algae islands, the result of algae blooming on the bottom because sunlight can penetrate deep down. The islands of algae float around and disrupt shipping lanes and smell like crazy. The natural order of fish is also highly disrupted. Fish that use to feed on plankton no longer can because its all gone. The rest of the food chain is then disrupted. Few fish will eat the mussels, but some do.

They also clog up the pipes that are used to provide water to cities. They are not good by any means and they have no natural predators here in the US.

Originally Posted by srock

It sounds like its just a matter of time before the attempt to control them fails.

If states don't come up wiht some regulations to prevent them that are followed across the board, then yes it will fail sooner or later. Now if the state can come up wiht some sort of real checking and quarantine system then it won't fail, but anything left up to the govt is likely to suck

About control. They have preditors in nature. The round Gobi. Attempts to introduce them in the great lakes resulted in the gobi's eating local fish eggs not the mussels. Currently the BLM is testing a bactira that kills them naturaly, but apparently not fish.
No they do not survive in brackish or salt.
Attitude is everything. If you all are sure this is in vein, and "play the system" then, sure enough some d bag will bring some from somewhere.
I dont make much more than 7 an hour......

I don't think it's futile, but the current checks at lakes in this state aren't going to stop it. They need to become more uniform throughout the state and they need to do more than just wash the boats and inspect them. Outlawing ballast is like treating the symptom not the problem. Honestly, if all the states required a mandatory quarantine of un tagged boats, then all had the same rules, so they then could accept tags from other lakes they would be on a better path.

I agree totaly, an interstate accord is THE ONLY WAY. my bad.

WTF is this about, and states have their own laws. Move to china if you want communism

I talked quite a bit to one of the Tahoe lab techs during the Sacramento boat show, OK she was cute and I was bored.

She clearly had no idea how the raw water systems in any boat much a wakeboard boat really worked. She did however understand that the 140+ degree water or bleach would kill the offending species. She said that they did not use bleach as it was toxic so that was against the program directives in general. So the 140 degree water seems to be the solution.

It seems that the current solution is to try to use a fake-a-lake to fill all the ballast tanks and motor with hot water to flush them out. The problem is keeping enough 140 degree water on tap. My suggested solution is to use the boat motor as an additional source of heat. Using the correct flow of unheated tap water you warm the motor until it delivers a steady flow of 150 degree water from the exhaust. You then capture that water and pump it through the the ballast tanks until they are full and ejecting 140 degree water from each overflow.

I know I could set up a simple system that captures hot exhaust water and pumps it into taps into the ballast fill lines fairly easily or set up a slightly more permanent flush manifold to feed the pumps from water out of the exhaust manifolds. It's just a little tricky to manage the flows so nothing overheats.

That picture of the dock tire is unreal! Is there more pictures people have of total infestation? I've heard Lake Mojave (on the Colorado river at Laughlin) is infested, but I've never noticed anything like that. How come?

Never heard of them in Florida waterways. Can they survive in warmer climates?

Originally Posted by mikeski

You then capture that water and pump it through the the ballast tanks until they are full and ejecting 140 degree water from each overflow.

Depending on the boat that could be asking a whole lot of the trailer. I doubt it would hurt anything to do it once or twice but I'd be hesitant to sit an extra 2,500+ lbs of weight on my trailer every time I take the boat out. I could see that causing parts of the trailer to fatigue faster.

BTW, I don't have 2,500 lbs of ballast (Hope to soon though) nor do I use the boat in an area that has ANS inspections.

Originally Posted by mojo

WTF is this about, and states have their own laws. Move to china if you want communism

I don't think it's about producing a federal law that forces states to cooperate, but I think it's more abotu states working togther to help solve a problem. It's ecspecially important in the western states where much of the water of the west coast is taken from places like colorado and Utah. If the mussles stop the ability to pass that water, then you could have huge problems

Originally Posted by mikeski

I talked quite a bit to one of the Tahoe lab techs during the Sacramento boat show, OK she was cute and I was bored.

She clearly had no idea how the raw water systems in any boat much a wakeboard boat really worked. She did however understand that the 140+ degree water or bleach would kill the offending species. She said that they did not use bleach as it was toxic so that was against the program directives in general. So the 140 degree water seems to be the solution.

It seems that the current solution is to try to use a fake-a-lake to fill all the ballast tanks and motor with hot water to flush them out. The problem is keeping enough 140 degree water on tap. My suggested solution is to use the boat motor as an additional source of heat. Using the correct flow of unheated tap water you warm the motor until it delivers a steady flow of 150 degree water from the exhaust. You then capture that water and pump it through the the ballast tanks until they are full and ejecting 140 degree water from each overflow.

I know I could set up a simple system that captures hot exhaust water and pumps it into taps into the ballast fill lines fairly easily or set up a slightly more permanent flush manifold to feed the pumps from water out of the exhaust manifolds. It's just a little tricky to manage the flows so nothing overheats.

Hot water will kill them, but the problem is can you be sure that everytime a boat is washed that every inch of it is hit and that every microscopic larvae is killed? If you're only paying these people $7 an hour do you not think human error won't be involved?

Sounds weird but going forward, what kind of changes could a mfr do to the ballast system to help prevent them from growing in the ballast tanks?

so we keep the states seprate systems of inspections, and every one can wait in line every time they go out of state. Got over the comunisim. They can live in warmer climates. I am going to work on a way to use my hot engine water to flush ballast. Like a hot water transom shower? I am alos talking with the head of our state ans program on training my own dog to smell vellegers. Might work.

The other way theese bastards are going to spread to lakes with inspections is fishermen. Many fish at night. We can not staff 24 hours a day, no money, If we close chatfield at night the walleye fishermen would THROW A FIT. so now, its honnor system with night and after hours inspection.

Bleach is used in new mexico. we(colorado) do not use it, due to saftey, and its corrosive nature. It tears up plastics.

Potasim chloride kills them, but contact time can be hours. Do you want us to treat your ballast with that for all day, or 10 seconds or less with 140 degree water?

The issue is with sureflo and tsunami pumps being rated at 130 max temp. So if your ballast is complicated, we may have to reffer you to tommys or another dealer with insurance and more skills.
So in Co, we need to get 120 degree water in your ballast with out doing damage to your pumps. Our heaters max out at 160, but we can not control the temp below that.

Chris, sorry I wan't trying to insult you with the $7 comment.

mikeski, you got a good idea, if you could figure out a system to run off the cooling water. On my boat I could easily plumb a line off of the heater hose to the ballast manifold with a valve in between. Would make it very easy to wash down the tanks.
Difficulty would be getting the engine water up to temp. I think it would only work on a heat soaked engine and would need to be done on the lake. Would have to have a program like take a lap and then come over to the special dock to disinfect your ballast. Then you'd also be discharging into the lake where If you washed a couple live ones out on land they'd die for sure.

in theory, if you could spit out ANY water from ballast and it was ovewr 120, your good.
I was not insulted. it is what it is.
I herd a rumor that division of wildlife pays their ans techs 12 an hour. Big ballin lol. some day. My pay check is not enough to support my family, but student grants help, and even though most hate me for being "the man" if I can help a feww wakeboarders and family boaters understand, and get through this stuff, im way happier than I was cooking for jerks.

Originally Posted by Thrall

Chris, sorry I wan't trying to insult you with the $7 comment.

mikeski, you got a good idea, if you could figure out a system to run off the cooling water. On my boat I could easily plumb a line off of the heater hose to the ballast manifold with a valve in between. Would make it very easy to wash down the tanks.
Difficulty would be getting the engine water up to temp. I think it would only work on a heat soaked engine and would need to be done on the lake. Would have to have a program like take a lap and then come over to the special dock to disinfect your ballast. Then you'd also be discharging into the lake where If you washed a couple live ones out on land they'd die for sure.

I didn't take that as insult at all man, it's just a fact. The inspectors don't make good money and so you will have issues where things aren't done well.

Like I stated earlier, as much as I hate the standley lake system it's the best int he state by far and away. Now if the whole state had the exact same system then the tags could be used form lake to lake and you'd know the boat was clean. If the boat didn't have a tag it would have to be washed and dry docked for 11-15 days before it could enter any of the lakes in the state. If other states also started using the same system then you'd be able to go from state to state with the tag and be safe. This is all assuming the lakes were mussle free prior to starting the system.

There's a girl (sorry, I'm an old guy) that works at Horsetooth that really knows her wakeboats and how much ballast they have like you do Chris. She's obviously a wakeboarder and knows her boats which I think is helping them out up there a bunch much like you are making a difference at Chatfield. The prior year the people really didn't know much about ballast and how much a boat holds, how many tanks, etc.

For me it's easy, I just disconnect all of my fat sacs and drain them out and roll them up and then when we get to the inspector they are ready to go when leaving the lake.

Sorry you were talking to the other chris, narcissism at its best

What about boats with pure vent ballast? I can not pump water in and out, so what to do? I know that I'm in water that has them ( lake Havasu, lake Mohave, Colorado river)

Can you open the drains on the ramp as you are being pulled out?

Yes and always do. But how can the see the inside, or long as there open they should not bother me.

To me that seems like it probably empties more water than most other systems because they all have to pump the water out.

What have you heard about Lake Powell shutting down? Wayne over at Wayne's Words says they are getting ready for it now.

Shut it down thread!