of Lake Powell at about 4:15 p.m. with winds gusting to 54 mph. Waves in Wahweap and Padre Bays on the lake reached heights of six to seven feet.
The storm was over in less than thirty minutes, but thirteen vessels, including a houseboat, were swamped by the wind and waves. Three NPS and one Utah State Parks patrol boats responded to distress calls from sixteen separate parties, and nineteen people were retrieved from locations around the lake.
There’s one piece of good news from this incident: all of those who were picked up by rescue personnel were reported to be wearing life jackets, and no injuries were reported. Most of them had been able to make it to shore or shallow water on their own, but were unable to use their boats, because the vessels were swamped.
We were nervous about our maiden voyage on Lake Powell. Despite spending so much time diving from and living on boats, neither of us had ever commanded the helm. Kayaking experience wouldn’t do us much good here.
The friendly lady on the other end of the reservations line sounded a little alarmed:
“There’s just the two of you?”
Her comment would be foremost in my mind during our initial attempts to successfully beach our rented houseboat. We had tried to persuade Greg to come along as our deck hand, but familial obligations and the need to quarantine for 2 weeks on his return were obstacles.
The pre-Covid plan for this week had been a cold water diving trip with Greg, a return to British Columbia, where nearly 20 years ago the three of us dove with our Pacific Northwest friend Dave. The British Columbia trip wasn’t officially cancelled until very late, only one month before, when Canada again extended its ban on non-essential travel.
This came as no surprise. Covid-19 cases were spiking in the US in the summer months, while Canada had successfully kept their numbers down. By this time, Steve and I were so sure our Canada trip would be cancelled, we didn’t even bother checking the status of our drysuit seals. I began looking for alternatives.
The seed for this trip was probably planted on an earlier pandemic escape trip. In late June, instead of shooting orange sand dunes and craggy trees in Namibia, we did a small group mountain biking and camping trip with Rimtours in Southern Utah. A couple on the trip had just returned from camping at Lake Powell.
I looked into kayaking and camping trips on Lake Powell, but because of Covid-19, they weren’t running. I thought it was unlikely we could find a houseboat to rent, it being so late in the season, but thought it couldn’t hurt to check for a cancellation. We lucked out with a cancellation for a 5-day trip, for the 46 foot Expedition, the smallest and most basic of the rental offerings. It was close in time enough, we’d have to pay the full tariff, not just a deposit, if we wanted to secure it. We bet that our British Columbia trip would be cancelled and double booked. Of course, our BC trip was ultimately cancelled, rescheduled (as was our Namibia trip) to 2022.
Our partner Ugne turned out to be a good source of information on house boating on Lake Powell. She and her family had done a trip the prior year, were heading to the lake the week prior to us this year and had already reserved a boat for next year.
One of the best pieces of advice she gave us was to bring binoculars. This proved invaluable! The lake is a labyrinth of fingers and coves and buttes. The main channel is marked with even-numbered red and odd-numbered green mile marker buoys, but trying to read the number from any distance away is near-impossible without binoculars. Inevitably, the number was turned away on the floating markers.
We were armed with maps and GPS (also good suggestions) because telling one’s location just based on landmarks is difficult. Even a cursory comparison of the maps, both physical and GPS, revealed the dynamism of the lake topography. Depending on the lake level, features appear and disappear and channels widen and narrow and even disappear.
We tried for early check-in, which lets you deal with paperwork and sleep on board the night before departure, but they were fully booked. When asked what time we’d like to do our on board training, I grabbed the earliest available time, 9 am. That’s how we came to stay at the marina hotel the night before sailing. We were coming from Sedona and rather than rise at painfully early o’clock to make it in time, we decided to stay the night before.
Escaping Sedona’s gravitational pull wasn’t without a few hiccups or two. Almost as soon as we cleared our driveway, I realized I’d forgotten my phone, essential not for phone calls or texts, but for the PhotoPills app.
We ordered a reuben and a tuna sandwich and scones from Wildflower Bakery after retrieving my phone. As soon as we pulled into the parking lot, only a few blocks from the house, Steve realized he forgot the Nespresso coffee maker, still sitting on the kitchen counter. The aeroccino, oat milk and capsules were with us, but wouldn’t do us much good without the machine. Surprisingly, the boat had a coffee grinder in addition to a coffee maker.
Our food was ready after zip-back-to-the-house trip number 2 and we were on our way to Page, gateway to Lake Powell, 3 hours north. We had planned our afternoon departure with an eye toward possibly shooting the sunset at Horseshoe Bend, just south of Page, but as we neared it, the haze of wildfires discouraged us and we headed to the marina.
My original concept of this trip was the houseboat as an aquatic recreation vehicle, which could be readily moved from beach to beach, allowing us to explore different limbs of the labyrinthine maze of arms and fingers and coves.
My first reservation iteration secured us 2 single kayaks in addition to the houseboat. We used to enjoy kayaking enough to have done multiple kayak camping trips, including in Alaska’s Glacier Bay, in northern British Columbia near Port Hardy and in Baja, from Loreto to La Paz. But that had been in the 1990s, before Steve’s worsening spinal stenosis made the twisting motion of kayaking increasingly painful, enough that we sold our kayaks.
But as the trip date approached and the more I learned from Ugne, the more it became necessary to refine this plan. Houseboats, while mobile, are not nimble and securing them, with 2-4 anchors, is difficult enough that it sounded like a better plan would be to park it as soon as we found a suitable beach and explore on a more nimble craft.
Back on the phone I went, cancelling the 2 single person kayaks in favor of a double and adding a jet ski, which holds 2 people. But jet skis have no sun protection and the more we thought about it, the more it seemed necessary to have a speedboat. Many people use speedboats for waterskiing and other sports, but our primary interest was in reaching and exploring side canyons.
Which is how I came to be talking on the phone with friendly reservationist number 3, a veteran of 17 Lake Powell houseboat trips herself and another font of information.
It was she who raised my alarm level slightly, with the “There’s only two of you?” query, after a discussion of how one of us would have to drive the houseboat and the other would have to drive the speedboat through “The Cut”, a narrow channel between Castle Rock and Antelope Island.
Gulp. We’d been picturing ourselves driving together, one remembering steps the other forgot, towing the speedboat behind. I learned from her that this plan was fine, once we were through the cut. Ugne mentioned using the speedboat to scout ahead of the lumbering houseboat to find a suitable beach.
From the Lake Powell Marina website, I learned from a series of YouTube videos what constituted an ideal beach (bordering deep water) and how to spot a too shallow beach (lighter color, protruding rocks, plants sticking out of the water). Our houseboat orientation was conducted by Aidan, a young man with a nose ring, which seemed to interfere with his positioning his bandana mask over his nose. Going through the checklist, an immediate problem became evident. This boat had no ramp, used to disembark from the boat to shore. A prior renter had damaged it and no, there were no other boats or temporary ramps available. We were offered $100/day discount off of our tariff.
To manage, we had to employ a white plastic chair on the beach to mitigate what would otherwise be a giant step, a 4 foot drop from the bow to shore.
Ugne had texted me that they had parked their boat in the last western offshoot of Last Chance Bay. Steve sent me ahead in the speedboat to scout for a landing spot. Of course, him coming on the walkie talkie to urge me to push the boat to greater speed actually impeded my progress, as to hear anything over the roar of the engine, I had to greatly slow the boat.
I loved the swollen and rounded pink and white speckled formation of an inlet on the east side, the next to last, so marked it on the GPS and radioed my find back to Steve. We met up in the channel and turned into the finger. Steve immediately zipped passed my first and best candidate. Another great option was occupied by a family in a speedboat, probably out for an afternoon excursion. A huge houseboat occupied a prime spot already.
Several spots had sandy swaths just wide enough for a houseboat, but were flanked by rocky patches on either side. Our first attempt was on one of these and didn’t go well. I had to persuade Steve to turn around and try my intended candidate, similar in the rocks/sand/rocks configuration, but oriented better to the wind.
Our second effort didn’t go well initially either. While I hung back in the speedboat, Steve drove the front of the boat onto the shore. The idea is to drive the bow onto the sand enough to make contact, then nudge it a bit further. The first time, the boat wasn’t square enough on the sand and the wind was trying to turn the boat parallel to the shore. Steve didn’t make that mistake the second time. Even from the speedboat offshore, I heard the crash of dishes flying out of a cabinet onto the floor. The walkie talkie crackled to life:
Steve: “I broke some dishes.”
Me: “They’re cheap.”
Actually, a whole stack of white Corelle bowls flew out of a cabinet and went to ground, but only one broke. Steve’s computer fell too, but it survived. One way that houseboats differ from actual boats is that they don’t have cabinet and door latches to keep items from crashing.
I maneuvered the speedboat adjacent to the houseboat, enough to tie one rope to the big boat. When I boarded the houseboat, Steve was sweeping up the dish fragments, his hand was bleeding and he had a tiny white dish fragment in the sole of his foot. I managed to extricate it with my fingernails, thinking we didn’t have tweezers with us. Days later, hiking in Sedona, I realized I actually did have tweezers with me, buried in case of cactus emergencies in my hiking hydration pack.
Steve’s back was aching, so he stayed in the houseboat. His task was to keep the bow of the boat wedged on the sand. The back end of the boat needed to hang over reasonably deep water. Two anchors needed to be buried or otherwise secured on the beach and tied to the stern.
I dug and dug, hitting stones within the sand. The hole was supposed to be 2 feet deep. The anchor looked huge next to the hole, despite my exertions, and was so heavy I could hardly pick it up.
Steve came ashore to move the anchor into my not big enough hole and to dig the second hole. I changed into a bathing suit, planning to swim the anchor line to the back of the boat. But without him at the helm to keep the motors running and the boat pegged to the shore, it was precarious, to say the least.
Suddenly, two handsome good Samaritans from Laguna Niguel came by on a jet ski, armed with shovels. Evidently, they’d been witness to our first flailing attempt to tie up the houseboat. Our anchor holes were only 10 feet up the beach and not angled out wide enough to achieve the desired 45 degree angles.
These two knights in bathing suits were veterans and had been on the lake already 2 weeks this trip. They assessed the situation and decided moving the anchors up higher and wedging them behind small boulders on the beach was a better strategy. Then they helped subdue the spinning speedboat by bringing it alongside the houseboat and securing it with two ropes. Thanks to them, we were set for our stay (or so we thought). Now I understood what Ugne had meant about parking the houseboat and ditching it for the duration.
We gradually learned our boat’s quirks, such as the hand soap and lotion being swapped in their bathroom dispensers. The refrigerator did not inspire confidence. It definitely wasn’t a food safe temperature with the generator off, leading us to use the freezer as a refrigerator. Fortunately, our recently acquired and enormous Yeti cooler kept our Blue Apron meats an appropriate temperature.
Steve cooked up a premium meal for dinner, chorizo meatballs with golden raisins, shrimp with arugula, and corn.
The evening was definitely the day’s crowning glory. The wildfire haze we’d seen the prior day made us concerned the night shooting would be affected, but it was a warm, still, balmy, windless night, perfect for shooting the night sky. The milky way, the stars and multiple meteors were on glorious display and the water was so calm we could see reflections of the stars in it.
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