by Jason Gabak October 23, 2025 in News, Press-Observer

https://eaglenewsonline.com/new/2025/10/23/the-sla-celebrates-john-menapace/
submitted by Frank Moses, SLA Executive Director

Earlier this month, one of Skaneateles Lake’s fiercest defenders and protectors retired from the Skaneateles Lake Association’s (SLA) Milfoil Control Program.

Since this program’s inception in 2006, John Menapace, a long-time Skaneateles resident, and his company Aquatic Invasives, Inc., have successfully run the SLA’s milfoil control program.

So, in honor of his many contributions over the past 20 years, several board members and Frank Moses, SLA’s executive director, hosted a retirement luncheon for John and his wife Mary at the Sherwood Inn on Sept. 14.

At this luncheon, board members shared their favorite memories of Menapace’s tenure.

They also expressed their thanks and gratitude for his commitment to protecting the lake.

“Every lake homeowner, boater and swimmer who has enjoyed our lake over the past 20 years owes John and his team a huge debt of gratitude. They are true unsung heroes. Without his expertise, creativity and unique problem-solving skills, not to mention the incredibly skilled divers he recruited, managed and mentored, our lake would be overrun by this weed,” said Dana Hall, SLA’s president.

And the statistics bear this out.

Since 2012, each and every summer, Menapace and his team covered roughly six acres of milfoil growing along the lake’s shore.

That’s a total of more than 108 acres in 14 years.

To put that number in perspective, the Skaneateles Country Club has 61 acres.

Needless to say, that’s a lot of milfoil he and his team successfully killed off. And this total doesn’t include the milfoil they manually removed for the first five years of his tenure

“I have so enjoyed working with John over the past 14 years. He’s been a true partner and an ardent protector of this lake. Everyone in the Skaneateles Lake community needs to know and appreciate what he has done to keep our lake free of milfoil,” said Fran Rotunno-Fish, SLA board member and membership chair. “He will be so missed, but I am thrilled for he and Mary as they start their next chapter.”

Skaneateles’s history with milfoil

While milfoil was first detected in 1974, it did not become a concern until the late 1990s, when boaters and swimmers started noticing large patches near the Skaneateles Sailing Club and the village jetty.

A full-lake survey conducted in 2001 found 39 large patches of milfoil, but when that survey was repeated in 2006, the number had nearly tripled to 111 patches.

This explosive growth rate led to the establishment of the SLA that same year, with the late Dr. Robert Werner, a preeminent limnologist from ESF, leading the new non-profit’s efforts to mitigate milfoil’s spread.

It was Werner who partnered with Menapace and his company to devise a strategy to remove this invasive from the lake.

At the time, the established processes used to remove milfoil from nearby lakes included a weed harvesting machine on Otisco and Owasco, a milfoil-eating aquatic insect from Cornell University on Cayuga, and a strong herbicide used on Cazenovia Lake. Werner and Menapace determined none of these were ideal for Skaneateles Lake, especially the herbicide.

After further research and study, Menapace decided the best approach was to use divers who would pull the weeds out of the lake by hand. So, starting in the summer of 2006, after the SLA surveyed the lake and identified the largest patches of milfoil, Menapace and the divers “harvested” the weed, discarding the milfoil into large, 40-lb, repurposed onion bags and then bringing up the full bags to one of the six used pontoon boats Menapace purchased for this work. At its peak, there were nearly 30 divers harvesting the milfoil from the lakes bottom, which resulted in 100 bags being removed each day.

This approach, however, required the divers to be submerged for extended periods so Menapace came up with a solution: instead of relying on regular scuba tanks, he used “hose diving”. He purchased two compressors from a company in California and used them to pump oxygen down to the divers, which increased the divers’ productivity and efficiency.

Taking milfoil control to the next level

Not satisfied with their rate of removal, Menapace began investigating the efficacy of laying benthic mats over the patches of milfoil, which would kill the plant by depriving it of sunlight. Unhappy with the limited options available at the time, Menapace decided to design and fabricate his own mat.

He cut heavy-duty polyester fabric into pieces measuring between 40 and 50 feet by 12 feet. He then designed and built a special, 14-foot-wide sewing machine to sew in pockets every six feet, in which he could insert steel cable to weigh the mats down to the lake’s bottom. He made 325 of these mats by hand. This design was so successful that the same mats are still used today. In fact, this summer, just like every summer for the past 14 years, John and his team successfully placed and removed these mats, killing off another 6.3 acres of milfoil.

He also designed and built a custom mat roller, which is attached to the boat, to retrieve the mats from the lake bottom. The diving team lowers this hydraulically powered mechanism into the water to roll up the mats, which are then raised to the surface, detached and tied up for pick up later in the season.

“I mean think about what he’s accomplished. Without any industry expertise or experience, back in 2012 he designed and fabricated the very same mats we still use today. To fabricate them, he figured out how to retrofit an industrial-grade sewing machine to create the pockets for the cables that would keep the mats weighted to the lake floor,” said SLA board member Bob Dewitt. “He did the same for the roller mechanism. And he all this while being very mindful of our donors’ dollars. If that’s not ingenuity then I don’t know what is.”

When asked what made him the proudest about his 20-year tenure, Menapace revealed his true character, saying he hadn’t really thought about it.

He said, “It was a job that just had to be done. So we did it. Simple as that.”

And they did. But it was not a simple job. It required developing new ideas, new processes, and new machinery from scratch and then constantly improving these over the past 20 years. But the impressive results speak for themselves.

A Conversation with SUNY-ESF’s Lake Expert, Dr. Kim Schulz
by David Figura, on behalf of The Skaneateles Lake Association

[As appeared in Neighbors of Skaneateles Magazine]

What makes a good or bad winter for Skaneateles Lake in regard to water quality, plankton ecology, invasive species and aquatic ecosystems?

“I guess it might be different answers for different lakes,” said Kim Schulz, associate professor and limnologist at SUNY ESF, who studies and teaches about plankton ecology and aquatic ecosystems.

There are several factors to consider, she said. They include the extent of cold temperatures in late winter and early spring, the amount of snow that falls or the occurrence of heavy, unseasonable rainfalls — and most importantly, the current management of the watershed and shoreline surrounding the lake.

Kim Schulz, associate professor and limnologist at SUNY ESF

Temperature

 “Most years, Skaneateles Lake freezes at the northern and southern ends, but doesn’t freeze completely over. A lake like that is ‘mixing’ all winter and becomes stratified (temperature-wise) in the summer months,” Schulz said.

Temperature affects the phenomenon of the lake’s water constantly ‘mixing’ during the cold months because the exposed surface water becomes colder than the warmer water underneath.  As a result, the colder water (which is heavier) is constantly sinking and mixing (thanks to the wind) with the water underneath, oxygenating and supplying food for the organisms and plant life underneath on the lake’s bottom.

“For Skaneateles Lake, a good winter is for the winter to be long and for low temperatures to extend into the spring so that the lake is not stratifying really early on in the spring.”

Schulz said the sooner the lake surface warms up in the spring and becomes stratified temperature-wise, the longer the lake’s surface has a chance to heat up during the warm months – a condition favoring the appearance of “unfavorable things” people have been seeing a bit more in recent years.

“Namely, cyanobacteria blooms and blue green algae,” she said. “They often out-compete other algae in warm temperatures.”

A cold winter and delayed water stratification in the spring favors the formation of single-celled diatoms, a type of phytoplankton. The diatoms do well in such conditions and are consumed by larger zooplankton (copepods) in the lake, which are larger and more nutritious for small bait fish. The bait fish are then consumed by the larger fish.

An abundance of copepods in a lake are also beneficial in that they consume decaying plant matter.

On a side-note, the presence of healthy (for humans) fish oils in the flesh of the larger game fish originates with the diatoms, Schulz said.

On the other hand, if it completely freezes over, Shulz said, it’s like “having the fish and other lake critters locked in an airtight room with no fresh air supply. If the ice completely covers the lake for a long time the oxygen (in the water) begins getting used up by the fish, algae, plankton and other living things in the lake,” she said.

Snowfall, Rainfall and Lake Management

Meanwhile, the amount of snow the area gets, and the slow melting of it throughout and at the end of winter, usually has no negative impacts on the lake. The lake level is managed by the city of Syracuse and its dam at the lake’s northern end.

After getting just half the normal amount of snowfall last winter, Syracuse could see a return to a normal (or close to normal) amount of snowfall this winter, with heavy amounts likely to come at the end of the season, according to forecasts from Accuweather and the National Weather Service.

“The more snowpack you get, though, the more run-off (there is into the lake) in the spring,” Schulz said. “The impact on the lake depends on the quality of watershed management you have around the lake, which is generally good. A poorly managed watershed would result in more materials (from the shore) flowing into the lake.”

Those ‘materials’ (excessive nutrients) will remain in the water and later provide food for harmful algal blooms, she said.

What would be a negative factor, though, of excessive snowfall or continuous ice conditions during the winter and/or early spring would be the amount of road salt put on roadways in the lake’s watershed. Salty water is heavier than freshwater, Schulz said, and sinks to the lake’s bottom.

“Some of the things that live in the sediment at the bottom of the lake that can be food for some of the fish feeding down there can be negatively affected by it being too salty down there,” she said.

Due to climate change, the lake in recent years has been experiencing an unprecedented number of torrential rain storms in the late winter/early spring, resulting in run-off from surrounding fields and other areas along the lake’s shoreline, Schulz said.

Schulz said the Skaneateles Lake Association (SLA), with the advice of scientists and researchers from Syracuse University and SUNY ESF, is doing a “great job” or trying to manage run-off and “nutrient-loading” (such things as nitrogen and phosphorus) into the lake. (More on SLA’s lake protection efforts at skaneateleslake.org/special-report)

It’s a difficult task at times, considering the steep-sided shoreline and number of tributaries that run into the lake, she added.

Schulz pointed out that Skaneateles Lake is a primary water source for the city of Syracuse and many surrounding communities ringing the lake, including the village and town of Skaneateles.

“There are few lakes in the country where water doesn’t have to be filtered before it is used for drinking water – definitely fewer than 5,” Schulz said.

Skaneateles is among them.

(David Figura is the retired outdoors writer for The Post-Standard and a member of the Skaneateles Lake Association.)

Ice, snow, and rain runoff that contains salt ladened de-icers can be harmful to the lake by carrying pollutants into our waterways and causing problems for the environment. Salt can impact a plant’s ability to absorb nutrients that we want to keep out of the lake.

Your walk or driveway may not cause much harm individually, but with an estimated 15 million tons of de-icing salt used per year in the U.S., all that salt has to end up somewhere. The salt can eventually seep into the ground or runoff into streams and lakes.

There are four main types of de-icers:

• Rock salt (sodium chloride) is very abundant in CNY, less expensive, and most widely applied. It can be toxic to underwater life and is the most harmful for plants due to its high chloride levels.
• Calcium chloride is a more expensive than rock salt, but not as much is needed. It is effective at temperatures down to -25°F, but it can also harm plants because of chloride.
• Magnesium chloride doesn’t add as much chloride compared to rock salt and calcium chloride, and can be considered less of a concern for the environment.
• Calcium magnesium acetate (CMA) is considered the best choice for safely melting ice. It costs more, but it can melt ice at a lower temperature, does not require as much to get the job done and does not impact plant nutrient and water uptake like rock salt.

Tips for snow and ice removal include:

• Look for “pet safe” de-icing products. If a product is pet friendly, it is likely to be eco-friendly.
• Apply de-icing products before a winter storm.
• Clear as much snow and ice before applying de-icing products.
• Don’t use salt as a substitute for shoveling.
• Only use the necessary de-icer amount. A mechanical spreader can help achieve proper coverage.

We all can do more to protect our precious water quality. If we act together, we can collectively be the solution to winter pollution.