Winter/early Spring desert boating.

[DesertAlbin736]

Watching national news, night after night we see stories of tornadoes across the South, blizzards and late winter snows in the Northeast, flooding in Northern California. Here in the Arizona desert we're coming to the end of what has been a pleasant if somewhat wetter than usual winter. All those Pacific storms that sweep in from the West have given us a desert that is in a spring time bloom of wildflowers the likes of which we haven't seen over the past few years of drought. Our local lake is brim full right up to the high water mark. Being former sailboaters, we still belong to and hang out with our friends in the Lake Pleasant Sailing Club. This past weekend we held our annual spring "Surf & Turf" combination raft up and beach party, nine boats rafted off the beach, and five RV's on shore, plus a number of "day trippers" coming out for BBQ of chicken fajitas and sides, campfire and story telling at night. Here are a few pictures....

Sonoran Desert in bloom, a riot of yellow wild flowers among the tall Sahauro cacti

600_459652283.jpeg

600_459652165.jpeg

A raftup of nine boats, ours being the lone powerboat, fourth from right.

600_459652483.jpeg

And the shoreside campsite. This lake was originally created when a dam was built in the 1920s and enlarged when a new taller dam was built in the 1990s, and this side of the lake has old roads that lead straight down into the water toward what were once boat ramps for the old lake shore, now submerged. This was a Federal reclamation project in the 1990s that converted the old lake into an enlarged buffer storage reservoir for the Central Arizona Project canal system that pumps water from the Colorado river at Lake Havasu to Phoenix and Tucson. As such, the lake level can vary by 50 feet or more as it gets drawn down during the summer and pumped back up from November to March.

600_459652355.jpeg

Overnight lows were around 50 degrees, highs around 80. Not bad for April 1st & 2nd.

[Bearkeley]

Very nice! Can't wait to get Mary Jo in the water! Thanks for the inspiration!