Clear Lake is not so clear these days

Pull up the satellite map from the San Francisco Estuary Institute, and it colors each lake by how much cyanobacteria the satellite can see — black for absent, up through blue and green and orange to a deep red at the top of the scale. Clear Lake glows red almost from one end to the other.

The map reads phycocyanin, the pigment cyanobacteria produce. It can’t tell you where the water is actually toxic — only where the bloom is. And the bloom is nearly everywhere. On the north shore, you don’t need a satellite. You can smell it.