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Week 1 Completed
Excellent first week with a large portion of the lake completed. See the "Upper Saranac" page under "Projects" for a map detailing areas covered and precise locations of milfoil harvested.
Business Feature
For a link to the article go to "Press Republican" under the "Articles" menu.
Many thanks to the author, Melissa Hart, for a well written and well thought story.
AIM in talks with the Fund for Lake George for 2010 hand-harvesting
Initial discussions with the Fund for Lake George (FLG) suggest a likely 6 weeks of work on the lake. The work will mostly consist of tackling large dense beds in the southern and eastern bays of the lake. Additional efforts will include clearing matted areas in advance of the Lake George Parks Commission dive teams who will be removing mats for use in other areas. AIM will also re-swim areas harvested in 2009, including Huddle Bay and areas around Bolton Landing.
First 2 Weeks Completed
This was our first use of the underwater communications system purchased from Divelink last fall. The results were excellent. Comms made our team more efficient and informed and allowed our surface people to make quick changes to strategy and direction without any delay. See "Brant Lake" under the "Projects" button for more on the work completed and a map of areas swam.
Sunnyside Lake week completed
The first day of work on Sunnyside Lake resulted in 105 full bags harvested (2,362.5 lbs) by the AIM two diver crew.
Day Two is finished with a new harvest record of 143 bags.
Day three ended with a total of 131 bags removed. The final day totaled 111 bags for a weekly total of 490 bags removed, roughly 15,000 lbs, by two divers.
8 diver crew swims western side of Brant Lake
No significant sites were located, all were sporadic growth with a few small pockets of density.
2 diver crew finishes first two weeks on Minerva Lake
The results were fantastic showing no dense pockets of growth anywhere. The team was able to swim and survey the entire lake bottom twice and encountered sporadic milfoil, removing about 26 bags over the full two weeks (780 lbs). All benthic mats (36 in total) that had been laid in 2007 were removed. In 2011, AIM will reduce its dive team presence on the lake by half, thus showing a continuous decrease in cost and the true success of the effort.
8 diver crew finishes first of two scheduled weeks on Chateaugay Lakes
The week consisted of attacking an area of dense Eurasian milfoil growth in the Chateaugay Lake Narrows in between the boat launch and a sandbar at the entrance to the Upper Lake. The crew harvested 810 bags of milfoil, an estimated total weight of 24,300 lbs or 12 tons.
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AIM first appeared on Brant Lake in 2008 with a six person crew. The immediate priority area was identified as Sunset Cove, a large, wide littoral zone with heavy boat traffic. The area was identified as the most likely source for fragmentation and increased spread of milfoil throughout the lake. The AIM crew spent three weeks working in Sunset Cove and a bay just south of the Point o' Pines Girl Scout Camp. The milfoil was dense and picking was difficult due to a large amount of growth in a rocky shoal where roots wedged deep into hard crevices. Definite progress was made, but everyone knew that the area needed more attention in 2009.
In late May of 2009 AIM returned to Brant Lake with an eight diver crew. The focus was immediately on Sunset Cove and finishing what was started in 2008. In the first two weeks of work the crew harvested 196 bags for a total weight of 4,410 lbs. 132 of those bags were taken out of Sunset Cove. This early in the growing season the plants were small and low growing, meaning that these amounts represent a massive quantity of individual plants. The Sunset Cove area was 100% covered by the AIM dive team and new areas of the lake were being attacked all within a two week time-frame. The crew would return for four additional weeks throughout the season and managed to clear many new, dense sites and swam over all affected areas of the lake. In addition, the areas previously cleared by the team were re-swam (such as Sunset Cove) to remove re-emergent growth and fragments. 
In 2004 the Upper Saranac Lake milfoil control effort went big. In years previous, the Upper Saranac Lake Foundation (USLF) contracted with the Adirondack Watershed Institute (AWI) of Paul Smith's College for a small dive team, headed up by Tim Ladue. This team picked away at the large, dense beds of Eurasian milfoil found all over the lake and succeeded at reducing their overall density, yet they needed more manpower to gain control. Due to a successful and well-run fund-raising campaign the manpower for 2004 was five times that of 2003. The AWI dive teams, with the leadership and guidance of Tim Ladue and Dan Kelting, began to write the book on hand-harvesting.
In 2007, Tim Ladue left his position as Crew Chief to pursue other opportunities and passed on the duties to Andrew Lewis (now co-owner of Aquatic Invasive Management, LLC.). The dive team was reduced in size from a 2004 high of 30 people to a total of 12 (8 of whom were divers). Using the line-swim method pioneered in 2006, this smaller crew was able to cover the entire lake twice by swimming hard and maintaining a tight formation.
This contract consisted of one week with a two diver crew on Sunnyside Lake, a small kettle pond in Queensbury, NY. Since the lake is located outside of Adirondack Park Agency (APA) jurisdiction (ie: outside the blue line), the SLA was able to get permits to use aquatic herbicides. The fact that the lake has such slow turnover made it ideal for sequestering the chemicals and keeping them at high concentrations. The chemical of choice was Sonar.
In late August of 2009 the Fund for Lake George (FLG) contracted with AIM for four weeks with an eight diver crew. The intent was to clear out many areas of milfoil infestation previously mapped and described by the Lake George Park Commission around the Bolton Landing area of the lake including several islands and the heavily infested Huddle Bay. In the end all of this was completed allowing the AIM team to shift focus to the southern end of the lake in the village of Lake George where a large, dense and old bed of milfoil existed. A fifth week was added with only five divers to continue to reduce the density of the southern bed.
AIM was founded by Andrew Lewis and Tommy Thomson in August of 2007 after a combined total of seven years experience on the Upper Saranac Lake milfoil control project (see "Upper Saranac Lake" under the "Projects" link). By then, the work on Upper Saranac had been proven successful by an exhaustive study conducted by Dr. Dan Kelting of the Adirondack Watershed Institute (AWI). Tommy and Andrew had experienced every aspect of the project from topwater to diver to crew leader to project manager. Armed with wide ranging experience with milfoil removal, successful techniques and a solid education in Natural Resources Management from Paul Smiths College the two formed Aquatic Invasive Management, LLC.
The Upper Saranac project taught us the value of innovation. In a natural system there are no straight lines and no simple answers. That is why we are flexible at all times and teach that principle to our crews. We make changes to our techniques as soon as we see a reason. We shift strategy on the fly using a playbook of swim methods. Each year we come up with something entirely different that increases our impact while reducing overall cost.