Dudley Pond
Caring for your Backyard
Welcome to Dudley Pond. Living around Dudley Pond is like having a 90 acre backyard or
a park near your house. Dudley Pond is used by people year round for fishing, boating and
swimming. It is a unique lake that warms up nicely in the summer, and is used for ice
fishing and skating in the winter. There is abundant fish life in the pond, including
smallmouth and largemouth bass, pickerel, yellow perch and bluegill sunfish. Abundant and
diverse bottom vegetation provides good cover for these fish to thrive. As a state
designated Great Pond, the pond is visited by people from many neighboring towns.
There are some unique characteristics of the pond that make it sensitive to human
influences. Dudley Pond is extremely shallow. The average depth of ¾ of the pond is eight
feet. There is only one “deep section” near the bottom-of-the-horseshoe of the
pond that reaches 28 feet. This means that compared to deep lakes you may be familiar
with, Dudley Pond does not contain a high volume of water. There is only one small inlet
stream and one small outlet stream feeding and emptying Dudley Pond. The inlet stream
dries up in the summer. The water level in the pond varies a couple feet over the course
of the year. That is enough to have the outlet stream not receive any water at all from
Dudley Pond through most of the summer, until enough rain in the fall brings the water
level back up again. This means that Dudley Pond does not have a high “flushing
rate” or movement of water through the pond to flush out any pollution that enters.
Dudley Pond is sensitive to pollution that may enter the pond from watershed runoff,
poor septic systems and what invasive weeds people may bring into the pond from other
areas. There are just over a hundred homes directly on the pond, but the activities of
many hundreds of homes in the watershed area influence the quality of water in the pond.
When someone fertilizes their lawn, and applies too much, the next time it rains that
extra amount may flow into the pond and fertilize the weeds in the pond. There are no
sewer systems in the watershed, so people need to ensure their septic systems are kept in
good working order so that coliform bacteria does not enter the pond. Boaters carrying
boats from one pond to another need to be careful because there are many invasive aquatic
plant species in other neighboring ponds that we do not want to enter Dudley Pond.
Since 1992, the Dudley Pond Association and the Wayland Surface Water Quality Committee
have been battling a particularly invasive aquatic weed called Eurasion watermillfoil. It
still exists in abundance in the outlet lobe of the pond, bounded by Lakeshore Drive,
despite several chemical treatments and various diver handpulling experiments. There are
ongoing efforts to control the weed, thought to have been first introduced by a boater
bringing in a fragment from another lake. It grows extremely fast, forming mats on the
surface if left unchecked. These mats remain until cold weather sets in. Please learn to
identify the weed and avoid breaking it up with a propeller if you see it near the surface
in the summer. Even a small fragment can float to another location, sink, then grow a new
plant. Do not confuse millfoil with curley leaf pondweed. Curley leaf pondweed grows
abundantly throughout the pond, reaches the surface in June, then dies back by mid July to
remain at a reasonable depth, out of the way of swimmers and boaters.
