Big waves and aquatic invasives: Vermont’s home lake rule

Picture this: a motorboat puts onto Lake Champlain. As you watch it move out towards the middle of the lake, you notice something odd happens: its stern is down, and its bow is up. As it moves slowly along, you realize that it is producing very large waves and that rather than a water skier, there is a person on a small board apparently surfing on the boat’s large wake. What you are observing is a wake boat in wake-sports mode.

The mechanism that allows wake boats to create these waves are ballast tanks that are filled with lake water when a boat enters a lake. Once the boater is ready to leave the lake, those ballast tanks are emptied. However, there is a problem. Those ballast tanks, and wake boats usually have multiple tanks, cannot be fully emptied, always leaving some residual water. If that boat filled its tanks in a lake infested with an aquatic invasive species, that boat could potentially carry those invasives to the next lake the boat enters.

The definition of an aquatic invasive species is that it has no natural predators, proliferates quickly, damages ecosystems and provides no nutrition or support for native fish or wildlife. Even very small fragments of an invasive like Eurasian watermilfoil or a few zebra mussel larvae, if carried into a lake in a ballast tank, can spawn a serious infestation.

However, this does not have to happen. Vermont has a rule to prevent this very scenario.

In the spring of 2024, the state approved new rules to regulate wake boats including the Home Lake provision specifically intended to prevent wake boats from carrying aquatic invasive species from lake to lake. The Home Lake provision requires that all wake boats select one home lake where it will operate. If a wake boat owner wishes to operate in a different lake, they must show proof that the wake boat has been properly decontaminated.

Unfortunately, the Agency of Natural Resources chose not to implement this provision of the rule last year due to lack of time but promised to do so for the 2025 boating season.

Yet here we are in June of 2025, and the agency has once again announced that it will not implement the Home Lake provision despite many of the lake associations on affected lakes repeatedly offering to work with the agency to shoulder much of the burden of implementation.

Why so much concern? After all, as far as we know, wake boats comprise a very small number of boats on the state’s lakes, although they are growing in popularity.

The reason is that an invasive infestation can harm a lake’s ecosystem, damage fisheries, make recreational use unpleasant or impossible, and can cause economic harm to surrounding communities.

We are amazingly fortunate here in Vermont to have so many still pristine and uninfested lakes. Yet the Agency of Natural Resources, the agency specifically charged by law to protect Vermont’s lakes and to stop the spread of aquatic invasives, has again chosen to put the state’s precious water resources at risk. It takes just one boat carrying an invasive to add another pristine lake to the list of infested water bodies.

With the boating season already well underway, what can be done?

If you love Vermont lakes you can help to stop the spread by making sure that all your aquatic gear — boats, kayaks, canoes, paddleboards and even life jackets and children’s toys — are cleaned, drained and dried whenever they leave a waterbody and before they enter another.

If you go to a lake with greeters, stop and talk with them. The greeters, managed by volunteer lake associations, are trained to inspect and clean aquatic gear and can also provide information about whether a lake is infested with an invasive, and if so, the best ways to avoid spreading it.

Finally, a few special requests to wake boat owners: please consider keeping your boat on just one lake this summer, especially if you have used your boat in wake-sport mode in an infested lake. If that is not possible, please drain your ballast tanks as fully as you can and keep your boat out of the water for at least 14 days to allow any invasives to die. Also, keep in mind that wake boats’ enhanced wakes can cause shoreline erosion issues and can be dangerous to other lake users, so please perform all wake sports in the lake’s designated wake-sport zone.

Our lakes are the jewels of Vermont. All of us working together can protect these very special resources.

(Pat Suozzi is the president of the Federation of Vermont Lakes and Ponds.)