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So I've been doing this for over 40 years. I've seen oil slicks, icebergs, current rips, floating trees, dead deer, birds, clumps of cattails and many other kinds of "stuff" floating around in the lake. Heading out this morning by the dawn's early light and I spotted immense mats of floating "something" probably 6 or 8 miles offshore of Gary Light. Didn't look at the GPS numbers, but it's not that important. In the gray light of dawn, I thought it could be a large oil slick - about half the size of an ore boat. So I diverted a few degrees and motored up to get a closer look and found it was floating green weeds. No idea where they could possibly have come from, but the weirdest thing was intermingled with the main part of the mat - both the big one and others nearby ranging in size from only a foot or two in diameter to 20 or 30 feet. Mixed with all of it -- the floating dark green weeds which could have been any number of species of usually submerged, rooted "pond vegetation" was a significant amount of light green colored "duck weed" which is that green/yellow tiny, like 1/8" diameter floating, growth which makes marshes/backwaters/shallow stagnant bays look like a carpet of green in much of the warm weather part of the year. Duck weed only grows in calm/stagnant areas.

Where-n-ell could these large floating mats have originated and why were they floating miles from shore? I can't even come up with a good guess. Should have taken some photos, I guess, but that didn't dawn on me at the time.

1 location its coming out of is Galien River New Buffalo. started about 2 years ago and been getting worse every year. You can see the rafts floating out of New Buffalo on camera on lakerart.com

I saw the same thing out on saturday BN. We were in them all day. To us it looked like buds from trees, even though we knew that was unlikely. We had it for miles. Never seen anything like it.

Slack57 is on it, almost exclusively "duck weed" mats, and been going on near New Buff for a few years.
Caught coho along outside edge of a 300-yard "mat" in mid-May in 40' off Grand Beach, caught perch under sparser weed mat in 20-25' on Saturday. There was some along MC pier on Sat. as well

Yes coming from New Buffalo was there on the 8 th

Yep while working nearshore this week saw duckweed floating this week near Gary, off Portage, and near the stateline past the condos in MC

Been a week of hot calm weather so I'd guess that any amounts "seeded" to the big lake from Trail Creek, Burns Ditch, and Galien River have proliferated on the lake rather than getting pounded by waves

Also the water is at its highest point in a really long time which surely has increased the habitat for duckweed to grow in nearshore marshes/backwaters in those areas

Took a cruise up the Galien last weekend and thought of this older post. Duck weed is extremely thick.

Not good.

It's called Duck weed. New Buffalo harbor is packed with it . Michigan D.N.R. is to lazy to do anything about it.