Encanto Park

LAKE MEAD, Mohave county's "little ocean," is a strange adventure. It comes upon you suddenly. It daunts you with its sheer vastness and overwhelms you with the unrealistic beauty of its setting.

From Boulder Dam, it doesn't look like "such-a-much," but from a racing motor boat or a slim sailing vessel it is big and wide and seeming limitless. A body of water over one hundred twenty miles long, stretching through narrow canyons whose cliffs frown down upon you or widening out into the great basins, Lake Mead offers the most exciting possibilities for the sportsman in western America.

Now, for a landlubber who has hardly ever shaken the desert dust off his shoes to speak with authority on such a sport as sailing almost smacks of brazen nerve. Let others more skillful with the rudder and sail ply you with the technicalities of the subject. We only know it's fun, an exhilirating experience like a cool shower, if you get the general idea.

Folks thereabouts tell us that autumn is a grand season for sailing or motoring on Lake Mead. During some of the heavy winds of summer, ugly waves rear terrifying heads that look like mad-cap ocean waves. In the fall, however, some of the fury has gone out of the wind and the autumn breezes spank you along with sufficient power to give you wings, but not hard enough to scare you out of your wits, (The true sailor welcomes and defies the hard winds and the high waves all in the same breath, but as far as we are concerned we sail for relaxation and want our winds no more than a gentle whispering breeze and the waves no more than harmless bits of white foam.) It is a pleasant hundred mile sail from Hemingway Wash to Pierce's Ferry. Lake Mead twists and turns, now narrow and now wide, now barely squeezing through two high cliffs, now opening up into bodies of water you can hardly see across, now rough and now placid!

You can anchor in a cove at night and pull a blanket of stars over you and your dreams.

You can loaf along at midday and drift with the breeze while you take a nap on the deck in the sun.

You can stop almost any place you want and fish for your dinner and you'll find good fishing, too, for Lake Mead has already at-tracted the attention of bass fishermen from Salt Lake to Dallas.

If you are accustomed to sailing at Bermuda or in other waters now clouded over by war, remember this . . .

While all the navies on earth could float there, you'll find no sub-marines in Lake Mead.... R. C.

Breezing Along On Lake Mead