News-Sentinel.com

Friday, 11/10/2000

TROUBLED WATERS

What we do today can improve our rivers for tomorrow



News-Sentinel photo by Steve Linsenmayer
On the water Canoeist Kurt Begue, in the lead, thinks improving the river's quality could stimulate a return of wildlife -- and people -- to the St. Joseph River.

By KEVIN KILBANE of The News-Sentinel

Kurt Begue typically goes paddling at least twice a week on the St. Joseph River.

The Fort Wayne man and four or five other marathon canoers train by stroking the 8-mile trip from Shoaff Park to the Mayhew Road bridge and back. Along the way, they see deer, herons, hawks and other wildlife. They don't see many other boaters on the brown murky river.

Because of concern about water-borne illness, Begue tries not to gulp any river water if his canoe capsizes. He also hoses down his canoe after each trip to wash off bacteria.

"Does the water quality keep people off the river?" he pondered. "I'd say, 'Yeah.' "

But it doesn't have to stay that way, said Steve Morris, from the Indiana Department of Natural Resources' Division of Outdoor Recreation.

Picture a fisherman standing along the riverbank: His reel screams as a 3-pound smallmouth takes line. Canoers and kayakers paddle by, some out for a leisurely float and others preparing for endurance races. Families play in the water at Johnny Appleseed Park, just as they did a couple of generations ago at the long-closed Municipal Beach.

"As the river improves, you'd be amazed at how people will come down to it," said Morris, who has seen the revival along the White River in Indianapolis.

Conservation officials say watershed programs and projects on the St. Joseph have made progress toward that vision.

Farmers' use of atrazine and other chemicals has dropped, reducing the amount that can be washed into the river during rains, said Greg Lake, director of the Allen County Soil and Water Conservation District. New formulas and methods of applying weedkillers and pesticides allow farmers to get by with using less.

Use of conservation-tillage methods helps reduce the soil erosion that contributes to the St. Joseph looking muddy, Lake said. More farmers are signing up for programs that pay landowners to plant grass filter-strips along streams and ditches. The grass prevents soil, fertilizer, herbicides and pesticides from washing into the water. But Lake said rainfall has been so variable the last two years that the initiative can't yet determine conservation measures' impact.

Improved water quality would encourage growth in the population and size of sportfish, such as smallmouth bass and rock bass, according to Jed Pearson, a DNR fisheries biologist based at the Tri-Lakes Fisheries Station near Columbia City.

As an example of what the St. Joseph could become, Pearson points to another St. Joseph River, the one that flows west to Lake Michigan through Mishawaka and South Bend: Steelhead trout and chinook salmon swim upriver from Lake Michigan to spawn. The river also has healthy populations of walleyes and smallmouth bass.

In downtown South Bend, the city diverts some of the river through a man-made sluice to create a white-water canoe and kayak run.

"It's a chain reaction," said Alger VanHoey, an Indiana Department of Natural Resources district wildlife biologist for this area. "If you clean up the water, things are going to come back. If those things come back, other things are going to come back."

If the St. Joseph River that flows to Fort Wayne returns to good health, people such as Kurt Begue won't have to worry about falling into the troubled waters of the river. Fort Wayne residents won't have to think twice when they draw a glass of water from the kitchen faucet. And the fight to return the river to a semblance of its former beauty and vitality will have been worth it.