My Dad works at the EPA and brought me a printout of the GDNR release about toxins in the water and what fish are safe to eat in Ga lakes.

Lake Hartwell : Main Body
 Largemouth Bass over 16" - One meal per month - Chemical, PCBs
 Hybrid&Striped Bass - Do Not Eat- Chemical, PCBs
 Channel Cat - One meal per month- Chemical, PCBs
Lake Sydney Lanier
 Striped Bass over 16" -one meal per week- Chemical, Mercury
 Largemouth Bass -one meal per week- Chemical, Mercury
 Channel Catfish - one meal per week- Chemical, Mercury
Lake Oconee
 No Restrictions on any fish. No chemicals found


According to this, PCBs are some bad stuff they banned back in 1976. It was used for electrical tranformer fluid,cutting oils and in carbon paper. It doesnt break down and stays in the water and sediment for many, many years. I think we all know what Mercury is and that its not good to eat because you body absorbs it instead of passing it.
This lake list is pretty long and has all the lakes in Ga 500 acres and over and most of the rivers too. Anybody else wanna know whats in your local lake?

tobosofkee?

Why once a month or week? Does the mercury dissipate in your body by that point?

Lake Tobesofkee
Largemouth Bass of legal size- one meal per week- chemical, Mercury
No other restrictions. No chemicals found in any other fish.

The Coosa River below the locks are pretty much don't eat due to dioxin.I'd be careful about eating anything out of the Oostanaula too.Years ago,you could tell what color the yarn mills in Dalton and Calhoun ran that day by the color of the water.

This has been a known issue for something like the past 8-10 years. The situation is just getting worse. It used to be 2 meals per month at those lakes you listed.

Sinclair and Oconee have always been clean lakes for eating out of. I'm not sure about Hartwell....I think its rather clean as well.

Lake Wedowee in Alabama is a good clean deepwater lake also. I seem to recall something negative about Lake Jackson.

If I eat fish.....they are usually Crappie or Bass out of Sinclair or Wedowee. I wouldn't touch a fish with a 10 foot pole if the lake at all in any way is fed by the Hooch.

You definitely don't want to eat anything out of the Savannah River downstream from Augusta.

I've seen all kinds of stuff go in the ocean.  The Navy stopped dumping plastics during the last couple of years or so that I was in.  We dumped all kinds of plastics before that.  Some stuff went into the water accidentally during unreps, i.e. a forklift (driver was OK and got piced up by one of the helos), jet engine, pallets of miscellaneous stuff.  We intentionally dumped TVs, lead acid batteries, all manner of plastics, cooling water for nuclear reactors, sanitation tanks. The list goes on and on.  It's been 20+ years since then.  I wonder who the big plastic polluters are these days, and how much of the plastic is 20+ years old.  Some of that stuff in the video was pretty beat up.

When the Navy banned the dumping of plastics, they showed us a video of animals with plastics affecting them.  Kinda hit home to me when they showed a cut open sea turtle with magnetic tape in it's belly, and a seal w/ a magnetic tape write enable ring around its neck.  I was thinking, "shit, that might have been me who dumped that stuff."  

Lol, don't even need to see the restrictions for that one, that's why i'm glad i have a pond.

Sinclair and Oconee are two of the cleanest lakes around BUT...Hartwell is THE most contaminated lake in N Georgia. We're not talking about feces and general trash in the water here, Lanier would surely lose that one. Just because the water looks nice doesnt mean its "clean".

Got a link ?

What are the causes of the pollution to hartwell that make it worse than lanier?

They use to print this in the dnr magazines where you use to buy ur fishing permits. i have know this for several yrs (10 +). that y i only eat out farm ponds or non man made farm ponds, and even then i dont eat much....

"For this booklet : Go to Environmental Protection Division at www.gaepd.org , choose publications, then fish comsumption guidelines."

sorry I dont know how to make it a hot link. I fail at the internets

Also I have no idea of why or how Hartwell could be more contaminated than Lanier. I would have bet my last dollar that it would have been the other way around.

What are the causes of the pollution to hartwell that make it worse than lanier?[/quote]

Between 1955 and 1977 the Sangamo-Weston capacitor manufacturer released an estimated 400,000 lbs of PCBs into Town Creek, a tributary of Twelve Mile River which is a major arm of Lake Hartwell (this value is of the same magnitude as the PCBs released by GE into the Hudson River). PCBs (chlorinated biphenyls) are toxins with a broad range of effects, including physiological, immunological, developmental and reproductive. PCBs degrade very slowly and remain attached to clay and organic sediments for many decades where they can be mobilized into the lipids of microorganisms and subsequently bio-magnify up the food chain. Contaminated sediments are located within the Twelve Mile River Arm and upper Seneca River Arm of the lake. For the past 30 years the Twelve Mile River and Seneca River Arms of Lake Hartwell have experienced a PCB-contamination based Fish Consumption Advisory, “Do Not Eat Any of the Fish.” Within other regions of the lake, an Advisory is in place, but is reduced to recommendations to abstain from, or limit the consumption of migratory fish (Bass).