Washington watercraft inspectors having busy summer

The staffers at Washington’s watercraft inspection stations have been busy this summer.

Nick Ramsay, supervisor of the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife’s boat inspection stations, said the agency’s four stations were on track last week to surpass 36,000 boat inspections.

They’ve nabbed 16 boats that were fouled with zebra or quagga mussels – tiny shelled organisms that the state wants to keep out of the Columbia River basin.

That’s about what Ramsay would expect for this point in the season, with Labor Day and the winding down of boating season approaching.

“It’s kind of an average year,” he said.

Officials in Idaho and Montana, which both run larger inspection networks than WDFW, echoed that sentiment. Montana announced Thursday that its stations have looked at 66,000 watercraft and encountered 35 boats carrying mussels. Idaho has conducted nearly 60,000 inspections and found 22 mussel-fouled boats.

“It’s been a busy boating season,” said Nic Zurfluh, invasive species section manager for the Idaho Department of Agriculture.

The inspection stations are the front lines in the fight to prevent the spread of mussels, which originated in Europe and are believed to have come to the U.S. through ballast water discharged from large ships.

Both zebra and quagga mussels were first found in the Great Lakes in the 1980s. Now, they’re found in a number of states around the country, including Texas, California, Utah, Nevada and Colorado.

They’ve yet to show up in Washington, Oregon or Idaho, and officials want to keep it that way.

Mussels do have ecological impacts, but the big concern is the havoc they’re known to wreak on hydroelectric and irrigation infrastructure. Mussels attach easily to hard surfaces, and they can do so in extremely high densities. When that happens in the wrong places, they can clog pipes, water intake screens and gum up the works of hydroelectric power plants.

In the Great Lakes region, it’s estimated that infrastructure damage from zebra mussels costs between $300 million and $500 million annually, according to a Forest Service study.

If mussels infested bodies of water in Washington, keeping power and water infrastructure running could cost more than $100 million, according to WDFW.

George Harris, president of the Northwest Marine Trade Association, said that’s why it’s important that mussels are kept out of the Columbia drainage.

“It wouldn’t be good for boating, but I think it would be worse for our infrastructure,” Harris said.

The only way they’ll jump from one region to another is by hitching a ride, which is why state officials harp on boat owners to clean, drain and dry their boats.

The networks of check stations throughout the Northwest are there to make sure that’s been done – and done effectively – before the boats are dropped into the water.

WDFW has four stations – one in Cle Elum, Tri-Cities, Stateline and a new one that opened this year in Clarkston. (Some local jurisdictions run their own programs.)

When staffers at the stations encounter a mussel-fouled boat, they wash the boat down with 140-degree water – hot enough to kill the organisms. Then, they scrape off anything visible. That step helps ensure that Washington’s monitoring program – which involves taking water samples from bodies of water all over the state – doesn’t pick up any false positive results from dead organisms that make it into the water.

Often the boats that make it to Washington have been stopped at check stations in Montana or Idaho. When officials there see a mussel-fouled boat that’s headed west, they’ll call Ramsay and let him know so he can make sure his staff get a look at it.

Sometimes, even though inspectors in another state have hosed it down, there will still be mussels stuck to the boat.

“You wouldn’t think that we would find them, but we do,” Ramsay said.

Ramsay has been overseeing the inspection program since 2018. In his time, the program has conducted 236,000 inspections and found 140 boats fouled with mussels. The program also uses a mussel-sniffing dog.

Ramsay has noticed a shift in the past five years – more of the boats his staff sees are newly purchased and traveling to Washington for the first time. Of the 16 mussel-fouled boats the stations have encountered this year, 12 were purchased out-of-state and were coming into Washington for the first time.

That trend has accelerated since the pandemic, Ramsay said.

People looking for boats are finding better deals in the Great Lakes region or elsewhere and then hauling them back or paying someone else to haul them back.

The University of Washington’s Washington Sea Grant research institute has been tracking title transfer data from the state Department of Licensing over the past two decades.

The data shows a significant jump in the number of boats bought out of state being brought into Washington in 2020 and 2021 – both had more than 1,000 recorded imports than 2019. But the trend slowed in 2022 and 2023.

More than 4,400 boats have been bought out of state and registered in Washington this year, according to the data.