Boaters on Otisco Lake have been navigating around a new obstacle this summer: a five-foot, 700-pound research and monitoring buoy bobbing smack in the middle of the lake.
Installed by the Upstate Freshwater Institute in June, the faded yellow buoy looks a bit like an old ATM machine set adrift, sporting an antenna and a solar panel.
The buoy measures water quality conditions in the lake’s water column, then beams that data back to UFI’s headquarters in Syracuse twice per day…