Lake Owasso

When I was a kid I spent many summer afternoons at the Lake Owasso Beach.  We would go swimming after biking the three miles to get there.  My Mom always said I could drown unless I rested for an hour after biking.  In what strikes me now as an insane sense of obedience, I sat there for an hour in the hot sun before swimming.  I'll never get those hours back.  We enjoyed swimming although I remember the painful walk through the hot sand to get to the water.  In a cement block building they sold soda, ice cream, gum, candy bars and chips but we never had the spending money for that stuff.  We'd just enjoy the water. I was such a swimmer; enjoying the buoyancy of my body in the water long past the time most kids would want to take a break.  The summer before last I surveyed Lake Owasso with my kayak. I paddled the perimeter of the lake admiring the homes and rating the homeowners. Nearly all of the lake is developed.  Only a small portion near the southern tip of the lake is natural.  And the natural part is all cat tail beds which are great for cleaning up the water. If the homeowners had golf course type lawn all the way down to the shore, I gave them a poor rating.  If they had some natural vegetation between their house and the shore, they got a good rating.  I was happy to see a loon family living on on the water.  This weekend I was saddened to learn of a huge fish kill on Lake Owasso.  It seems that as soon as the ice formed on the lake thousands of fish died and could be viewed through the clear ice.  All sizes and species of fish died including sunnies, walleye and muskies. The Department of Natural Resources is investigating starting today.  Did the fish die as a result of the development along the lake shore?  That lake has been developed since I was a child but it could have something to do with it. Did someone pour something into the lake to kill weeds and accidentally kill the fish?  Did the lake run out of oxygen?  The lake isn't very deep and is usually aerated but never this early in the season.  You wouldn't think the water would be so short of oxygen at the end of November to kill all these fish because the ice just formed in the past ten days.  I'm glad the cause of the fish kill is being investigated.  I saw one comment that said "I would never swim in that cesspool again."  I'm not convinced Lake Owasso is a cesspool.  I sincerely hope it isn't a cesspool.