It’s been on the lake for as long as I’ve been around, but I keep hearing more and more people complain about it. I sold my bass boat about 7 years ago and have only been out on the lake once or twice since that day.

Milfoil and hydrilla have been around for decades, but it sounds like eelgrass has got progressively worse over the past 10-15 years. Grasses have continued to do what they do for the past decades, grow and spread. But maybe at a more rapid pace. So much so, that homeowners on the water around here are now paying companies to install hydro systems on their boathouses to push the floating grass mats away and bringing in floating heavy equipment to clean up the areas.

Bow fishing use to be as popular around here as anything. When we would go out bow fishing, it wasn’t uncommon to see 10-20 other boats at night, on a weeknight.. (About 15 years ago) Most of them killing boat loads of carp. On the weekends there would be tournaments where hundreds if not thousands of carp would be shot. Bow fishing may still be as popular, but I don’t seem to see as many rigs being pulled down the road as I use to see.

People didn’t want all of the carp on the lake back then. Are we now dealing with the effects of mass killing carp?

I don’t know if we are or not. This was just an interesting conversation I had at a customers house the other day. He lives on the lake, in a cove, that he claims only in recent years started being overtaken by the grasses.

Those carp don't make a dent in the grass. I can deal with everything but the eel grass, that stuff is absolutely horrible. I'm sure there are ways to fish around it, just like there were ways to catch fish after all the grass died in the 90's. It is a pain the ass though

I wasn’t sure if they made a dent or not, but thousand of them disappearing, in my mind, could have made some kind of difference. I’ve never studied grass carp, though.

Eelgrass is the devil!

Eelgrass has been around Gville for a good while, but the last 5 years or so, it’s absolutely exploded. It grows really fast, much faster than milfoil or hydrilla, so it overtakes any area where the other vegetation has been eliminated. Spraying, harvesting, extra cold winters with heavy current, all play a role in disturbing grass beds. When this happens, it seems like the eelgrass jumps in and outraces the others. I know of old milfoil and hydrilla areas that are almost all eelgrass now. Ten years ago, there was virtually no eelgrass by my boathouse in Roseberry creek, just random patches of milfoil. Now, eelgrass has completely covered that part of the creek.

There was barely any grass 20yrs ago.

Carp never made a dent in the milfoil and hydrilla. Back in the early ‘90s when the stakeholder group wanted TVA to stock carp, TVA blocked off part of I think Spring Creek. Surveyed rhe vegetation, put in carp, and the fish ate the native vegetation.

The stakeholders got pissed and put in 300,000 carp. That’s one reason bowfishing was so good for years. It’s still good but not like 20-30 years ago. The carp don’t affect the eelgrass, either. There’s too much of it and they prefer softer plants. Carp eating eelgrass would be a last resort, sorta like deer eating cedars.

Talked with a couple of people this summer about the eelgrass exploding after the Kinston (Tenn) power plant coal ash pond dam burst. That released tons of water and sludge tailings that I’ve been told *maybe possibly* affected the pH balance and helped with the eelgrass growth.

I haven’t compared events more closely but it sounds plausible.

The river and its components ebb and flow. It also has hyacinth, which would really suck if it takes off like eelgrass.

Kind of like Privet taking over all the fence rows that use to be good habitat.

What happens when you introduce a hybrid with no idea what will happen when it takes off.

Native eel grass like you find in East Tennessee is not what is growing on Guntersville.