Boating in America's outback

Boat/US Magazine, March, 2002 by Ryck Lydecker

Houseboating on Lake Powell, in the middle of the Great American Desert, is a totally different experience so we dutifully followed the dockhand's instructions on anchoring our boat -- "Use a shovel," he said.

"Run the bow straight up on the beach," he'd told us in the briefing at Wahweap Marina, just outside Page, AZ. "Go ashore and dig a hole in the sand a couple of feet deep -- there's a shovel in the bow locker -- at a 45-degree angle from the stern corner.

"Walk one anchor ashore -- see? There's two 22-lb. Danforths on the bow rail -- drop it in the hole and cover it over. Tie that anchor off to the stern cleat then go ashore to the opposite side, dig another hole and do it all again with the second anchor."

Easy for him to say, but June in southern Utah is fry-an-egg-on-the-deck weather and by the time we'd reached Padre Bay and beached below Romana Mesa, opposite Gunsight Butte, the temperature had cracked 105 degrees. I wanna do this only once.

That had been the plan for my family and me since we'd talked with Bob Hirsch author of Houseboating on Lake Powell, a few days earlier. Find a secluded "anchorage" a few hours run from Wahweap -- Bob suggested Padre Bay, about 20 miles Upstream--establish a base camp on the beach and use the 18-foot "tow along" powerboat we'd also rented to explore the lake.

First regret: I'd forgotten to bring the handheld VHF radio. The houseboat had its own radio but the Boston Whaler Ventura didn't. So when our daughter Laurel, just home from college, set off with Mom and her little sister Suzy in the runabout to reconnoiter, I had to standoff in Padre Bay. Cutting lazy donuts in the water, amazed to be at the helm of a 59-foot houseboat in the heart of American's Outback, I soaked in the stillness until they found a suitable beach site and came back to lead me in.

Once we'd found holding ground at the end of a shovel, it dawned on us; so much lake, so little time. What to do first?

Suzy solved that -- Splash!

First exploration: the water slide off the top deck, which, months later, remained one of the highlights of house-boating on Lake Powell for an 11-year-old.

Noisy Neighbors

The day before, we'd driven five hours to get to Wahweap, outfitted our rental houseboat in desert heat, then cruised three hours though territory that's as much "Planet of the Apes" as it is "High Plains Drifter."

Northeast past Castle Rock and into Padre Bay, we staked a claim to a bit of beach, ate dinner on the deck and soaked in the desert stillness around a fire on shore in the cooling June night.

Perfect. But even perfection, it seems, can improve here.

Almost on cue, a full moon drew a bead on our private cove as it slid in dwarfing silence right into the notch on Gunsight Butte across the bay.

"This cruise is right on target," said my wife Marianne as we turned in without even giving the video cassette player, stereo tape deck or CD player a thought.

Our next big eye-opener came at daybreak. There we were, tucked away in a secluded canyon on this huge man-made lake in a sleep as deep as the canyon floor, 300 freshwater feet below.

But as daylight walked the shadows back to the foot of the butte, noises coming off the water kept splashing into our dreams.

Something's thrashing in the water! Is someone in trouble?

We eyed the cove from our bunk. Nothing. Nearest houseboat neighbor is a quarter-mile away. Only foot-long amber logs floating in the cove -- until Mother Nature's special effects crew suddenly turns them into writhing shapes that splash and roil at the surface.

It's fish. Carp to be specific, in some spawning ritual. Guess they're supposed to do that so it must be okay to slide back to sleeping, like everything else for miles and miles around. Even the rocks must have dreams here.

A Curious Ensemble...

It's got more miles of shoreline than the entire West Coast -- 1,960 -- if you can believe whomever it was that managed to measure the distance around Lake Powell's 96 serpentine canyons. But it must be true since some of those nature-made carvings cut as much as 20 miles into ... what? The landscape? Moonscape comes more readily to mind.

Let's settle for "rock." This is, after all, a valley that the Colorado River wore down through several geological epochs over six million years, give or take a few millennia. It's just filled up with a lot of water in these parts of southern Utah and a bit of Arizona.

About 27 million acre-feet of water (8.5 trillion gallons, to be somewhat more precise), backed up behind 580-foot Glen Canyon Dam. It took seven years to build it, starting in 1956, and 17 more to fill it to its 568-foot average depth (at a surface elevation of 3,683 feet above sea level). Eight turbines deep in the dam generate 1.35 million kilowatts of electricity, the lake supplies [H.sub.2]O to seven states and ... whew!

Just call it the second largest manmade lake in U.S. (the largest is Lake Mead). But boaters who know Lake Powell call it "the first wonder of the cruising world."