LAKE TAHOE
In early September, Keep Tahoe Blue and its partners installed four new mobile, solar-powered watercraft cleaning stations with onboard tools to make it easy for anyone to Clean, Drain, and Dry their gear and help stop the introduction and spread of aquatic invasive species in the Lake Tahoe region.
The stations, called “CD3 Outpost Blue” machines — for clean, drain, dry, and dispose — were placed at Baldwin Beach and along the shores of Fallen Leaf Lake in coordination with the U.S. Forest Service and the ExplorUS concessionaire who manage these public lands on the Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit (LTBMU). Installation of the new machines is part of a coordinated and growing effort to prevent harmful invasive species from spreading in local waterways. Keep Tahoe Blue strongly encourages all paddlers, anglers, and beachgoers to use the new stations on all their nonmotorized water gear, from kayaks and paddleboards to floaties, fishing gear, and life vests.
Keep Tahoe Blue introduced Tahoe’s first CD3 machine, a trailer-mounted version, in the summer of 2023 to help lake users Clean, Drain, and Dry their gear. The innovative devices are simple and free for anyone to use.
These watercraft cleaning machines are increasingly more vital since golden mussels were detected in California in late 2024. A particularly devastating aquatic invasive species, golden mussels reproduce rapidly, can survive for days out of the water, and attach to nearly any hard surface, including boats, trailers, paddles, and fishing gear. In less than two years, golden mussels have spread across more than 400 miles of California, prompting four counties to pass local emergency declarations.
Rigorous inspection and decontamination is much more difficult for nonmotorized watercraft and gear — stand-up paddleboards, kayaks, canoes, inflatables, fishing gear, water shoes, life vests, and more — which can enter the lake from any shoreline and carry invasive species. That is why the CD3 machines are so important. Since the first CD3 stations were installed, they’ve been used to clean more than 9,000 vessels.
The locations of all CD3s in Tahoe and more information are available at keeptahoeblue.org/cd3.
~ Keep Tahoe Blue press release
