Lake – Page 18 – Sheila365

Things not to take for granted.

Loved ones. Good health. Lake Travis.

One of my favorite artists is Mary Doerr. You can browse her extensive collection of prints either in person or online at Images of Austin gallery. The image below is a link from her online gallery of the print entitled Lake Travis. Monte gave me this print as a gift several years ago. The vantage point of the view in her print is above the lake overlooking Marshall Ford Marina and the basin. Across the way you can see Windy Point, the land on the left fading into the distance is Hudson Bend. There are no signs of Sometimes Islands in her print (which only start to show when the lake drops below about 658′), as she has captured the basin as we love to see it — full.

Below is a shot from a similar vantage point taken today with the lake at 626 feet. Sad to see. Let’s hope for LOTS of rain in 2012.

123011 — View of Lake Travis basin from St. Luke's.

But, even with our lake low and dropping, we can’t stay away. So, after our stop to look at the lake, we continued on to our marina. I joined Lori, Laura, Ann and Ireni for a ladies’ sail on Camelot. Monte and Joe went out on Cupholder to find some fish. It was a beautiful day, as you can see in the picture. Light northerly breezes made for a nice sail.

Today is Friday, New Year’s Eve’s Eve. Just 3 more days left of what’s been a great vacation from work. Here’s to not taking anything for granted. Cheers!

The golden hour.

This afternoon, though it was very chilly, we headed to the lake for some fishing. We picked up Joe, Kurt and Wally and motored over to the docks across the lake. Wally caught the first bass, and Monte caught 2 more.

We headed back to the marina as the sun was slipping away. I love the light at this time of day on the lake. It is the golden hour. The shot above is of monte’s 2nd fish, lit up by the golden sunset.

The shot below is of the sun as it was setting.

The shot below is from the cockpit of the catboat, after the sun has set. I love the colors of the sky at dusk.

And this last shot is of the crescent moon, with Venus to its left, as viewed from B-Dock, through the Christmas lights on Allegro’s rigging, as we were heading for home.

A good day, indeed.

Goin’ fishin’.

Today we headed out to the lake to spend the afternoon on the boat. It’s been a long time since I have been out there. I’m happy to report that our dock is still attached to land. It has rained several times since the beginning of November (thankfully), so the lake has risen several inches, and at least has not dropped, so they are holding off on moving us offshore.

I made a steaming hot batch of cocoa for the thermos, so that we could fend off the cold, and packed the peppermint schnapps and mini marshmallows.

We picked up Joe on B-dock and motored out into the cove armed with Joe’s fishfinder and several poles to see what we could catch. I caught a small catfish. Monte got a small bass. Mostly we just listened to Christmas carols on the iPod and watched the blobs go by on the fish finder.

It was a nice way to spend a Sunday.

Welcome to the Dam tour. I am your Dam guide.

Joe suggested a cruise down the lake to see the Dam. It’s rare to see the basin when the lake is so low – at 627.85′ today. It’s really not a basin anymore. Sometimes Islands are all the way out of the water, and connected to land, so, islands no more. The original river channel winds all the way around them. Windy Point looks more like Windy Acres. And many of the marinas have scooted out to what would normally be the middle of the lake, but is now the edge of the shore.

Monte and I joined Ken and Joe on Prelude for a sail. It was a beautiful day. We had nice breezes on the way down. The closest mile marker to our marina is mile marker 14, and the Mansfield Dam is at, well, mile marker 0. So, round trip was close to about 30 miles.

As we passed the Austin Yacht Club we got to see several of their regattas underway. The shot above is of some of the University of Texas Sailing Team’s Flying Juniors fleet. The 2012 Nationals will be in Austin. So they’re working hard to get ready. Good luck Longhorns!

Here’s a sight we don’t see very often…

And, finally, we snugged up as close as we could to Mansfield Dam. They have a string of bouys in front to keep people from getting too close – which foiled my plan to get a shot of myself touching the dam.

1023113 — Upstream side of Mansfield Dam.

Construction of the Mansfield Dam (originally called Marshall Ford Dam) began in 1937 and was completed in 1941. Mansfield Dam and Lake Travis are the only structures in the Highland Lakes chain specifically designed to contain floodwaters in the lower Colorado River basin. The lake can store as much as 260 billion gallons of water. Some other factoids from the Lower Colorado River Authority website:

Elevation when full: 681 feet above mean sea level (msl)
Volume when full: 1,135,000 acre-feet
Historic high: 710.4 feet above msl on Dec. 25, 1991
Historic low: 614.2 feet above msl on Aug. 14, 1951
Normal operating range: at or below 681 feet above msl
Spillway elevation: 714 feet above msl
Top of dam: 750 feet above msl

The floodgates are at the bottom of the dam and are used to generate electricity and for flood control. The spillway openings are on the right end of the dam in the picture above. Water will start to spill over them at 714′, but it’s never happened… yet. The highest I have seen the lake was 701.5′, which was over the July 4th weekend of 2007. Hard to believe there was ever that much water in the lake.

We had a really lovely sail. A nice Sunday adventure.

I shake my tiny fist at this drought!

Riff-Rafft-up.

We spent the night in Arky South cove. We enjoyed more laughs, music and good company last night. Mike and Kathy joined us on Soul Healer yesterday for a few hours, and Lori, Dave and Jake joined us this afternoon on Camelot.

Shortly after we woke up this morning, we were treated to a beautiful sunrise, coming up right behind the Commander’s Point lighthouse (well, water tower really). A lovely sight.

Then, later in the morning a funky fog bank sunk over the lake for a while, but shortly lifted for a beautiful, sunny day.

Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention… we have christened this and any future such auspicious gathering a Riff-Rafft-up. For obvious reasons 🙂 In attendance this weekend were Wally & Kurt on Dancer, Joe on Prelude, Monte & Sheila on Cupholder, and Marty & Sue (and Koko) on Caribbean Hug.

Have a great week!

629′ and dropping.

We’re back home. We had a nice time in the Pacific NW, but it’s nice to be home again. We flew in over Lake Travis and got these pics. The lake is at 629.07′ today, according to LCRA. We are lower now than we were in 2009, and only about 15′ more to go to hit the all time low. The shot above is of Hurst Cove and our marina. You can see the docks all stacked up. The marina sent a notice saying they’ll be moving some of the docks out to the middle of the cove. Not much water left in there.

This is a shot of Arkansas Bend. Arky North and South are slowly disappearing.

Below is a shot of Cow Creek. It’s hard to believe we were up in there for the March birthday raftup.

Pray for rain.

Never Forget.

We spent this day, the 10 year anniversary of the bombing of the World Trade Center, together with fellow B-dockers at the marina. We were all mindful of what day it was, but really enjoyed spending time away from the painful reminders and just enjoyed talking, fishing, floating and trading stories with friends.

The lake is at 632 and change – 3 feet from the low of 2 years ago, which will surely be surpassed. It’s sad to see the pasture out back that Hurst Cove south has become. This (poorly stitched together) panorama shows the view off the back of the marina looking towards Lakeway Park. Across the way you can see Hurst Harbor Marina (on land). All their boats have been moved across the lake long ago. Also missing is Johnny Finn’s floating restaurant that has been moved again to the mouth of the cove.

The shot below is Sail & Ski marina on the other side of the marina, looking out towards the main body of the lake. All the docks have been stacked to make 3 long docks. Johnny Finn’s is in the distance, right in the mouth of the cove. On the far right you can see the private docks stacked up on land in the dry finger of the cove.

Harvest Moon Slip-up.

It’s a full-moon weekend, which means another get together with our sailing friends. We have taken to doing “slip-ups” lately, instead of raft-ups, because it’s getting a bit unwieldy to raft-up bunches of boats together in the shrinking coves. So we party on the dock instead of at anchor. This is the Harvest Moon full-moon weekend, and to celebrate we wanted to do something big. So, Ramon graciously offered to roast a pig. So… how do you do that on a dock at a marina? Well, you use one of these things in the picture above – a caja china. Robert and Ramon set up on the middle of the newly-extended F, A & B Dock. The pig is inside the box on a rack, and the coals are above on a tray.

It turned out delicious. We had a TON of people, as Texas Sailing brought many of their boat owners over from Lakeway Marina who stayed in guest slips overnight. Tasha would know for sure, but we think there were about 50 people or more there.

A good time was had by all. iPod wars on Cupholder wrapped up about 3 or 4 AM. And, oh by the way, Mike, Wally, Robert and David stayed up all night playing dominoes and generally making a racket all through the night on Allegro in her neighboring slip. Crazy kids!

Limin’

We enjoyed a lazy Sunday at anchor. One definition of limin’ is to relieve from attention or effort; relax.

We definitely had that down today. Red Sky peeled off first thing in the morning, Va Bene left about lunch time. This is a shot of the 5 boats that were left. Joe joined us later on Prelude.

We floated for quite a while. This is a shot of a family of what we think are swan geese that was hanging out with us.

We all eventually ended up in Ramon’s cabin, which is air conditioned, has satellite TV and a big flat screen to watch the US women’s soccer team lose the world championship to Japan 😦

We saw Sue, who had been out on B-Dock for several hours when we pulled back into our slip.

We only spent about 24 hours on the lake, but it seemed like 72 or so after schlepping all our stuff back up the ever-steepening walk from the dock to the parking lot. We’ll do it again at the drop of a hat, though 🙂

Full Moon Raftup.

The moon is full, so it’s a full-moon raftup weekend! We joined the raftup at about 6 pm in Arky South – Rory & Greg and their friend Jane (who has her own boat on c-dock) were on Sapphire, Ramon on Y No Hago Mas Na, Robert & Tony on Voodoo, Kurt & Wally on Dancer, Pat & Dave on Va Bene, and Monte & me on Cupholder. Bay & Donna arrived on Red Sky right before sunset.

I can’t take a decent full-moon picture with my camera on a boat that’s rocking. I know this photo is blurry, but I posted it so you could see how beautiful and bright the moonlight was. We had a stern line to shore, so our bows were pointed east and we had a great view as the moon rose above the horizon.

The anchorage was nice, had a good breeze all night long. Amazingly, we did not play iPod wars on this raftup. That didn’t stop us, however from staying up until the wee hours. The party started on Ramon’s boat, and moved to Rory & Greg’s.

The lake is at 643+ and dropping fast. Both Ramon & Kurt’s boats got hung up on the emerging wall at the entrance to the cove on their way in. The sheer pin on our propeller broke right as we were coming in to tie up, so we had to drop a quick anchor ourselves so that we could fix it.

A little excitement, but everyone was rafted up in time to watch the sunset, which was beautiful, as usual.

Beer Can Regatta

buckeyebeercan — To the victor goes the spoils.

Today we held the first Beer Can Regatta of the year, and had a great turnout – Spike, Voodoo, Dancer, Prelude, Camelot and Caribbean Hug. Monte and I each jumped on one of the Catalina 30’s. Robert finished first and took home a bottle of Buckeye Vodka. So smoooooth! After the race a party ensued. More on that later.

Jun 11, 2011

We worked in the yard today, cutting down one of several trees out back that have died in the last few years of drought. Whew, that’s hot work!

We ended up at the lake, of course. This is the typical scene on any weekend, and sometimes weekday evening, on B-Dock.

We played with Marty & Sue, Joe, Kurt, Wally, Kevin, and new B-docker friend, David.

May 29, 2011

Every Memorial Day weekend the Austin Yacht Club holds the 2 day Turnback Canyon Regatta – sailing about 25 miles upriver on Saturday to the K-bar Ranch and returning to AYC on Sunday.

We sailed up one year as a cruiser, but the last 2 years or so there has been little wind, and some rain, so we have decided to stay close to home and watch from our anchorage in one of the Arkansas Bend coves.

This year, however, the wind was strong – gusting in the high 20’s.

Today we hung out at the opening of Hurst Harbor to watch the boats sail by. This is a shot of Kurt and Wally on Dancer as they zipped by. I believe they took first in their class yesterday. I think they were the first Catalina 30 that went by today, as well. Nice job guys!

May 27, 2011

This is the Friday before the long Memorial Day weekend. And we are headed to the lake! We’ve packed up everything to spend 2 nights on the boat and made it to the cove before sunset. We’re rafting up with Marty & Sue tonight, and tomorrow Lori & Dave will join us as well.

The lake is low, 651′ and dropping about 2′ per week. It’s so sad to see the water disappearing, but we’ll keep coming back to play.

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