Arizona—For Nautical Fun in the Sun

Toe rail snorkeling, mainsail moaning, rudder foaming, crew grinning, our sleek quarter-ton sloop reaches across a vast body of turquoise water.

Cotton clouds boil above our billowing blooper. A brisk breeze whispers through our shrouds, and our hull hums an ageless song of the sea. Chill spume hurdles the bow to drench our bare, sun-warmed skin. Surely we rejoice in the realm of Neptune Rex, Poseidon, Oceanus, Triton, Siren, and Saint Peter.

And where are we? Off San Diego? In the Gulf of Mexico? On Lake Huron?

None of these. We are sailing across Lake Powell, more than 180 miles in length, one of the greatest artificial seas in the world, containing 27 million acre-feet of water when full. Its shoreline is more than half that of California's.

Athwart the landlocked boundary of Arizona and Utah, Lake Powell epitomizes a revolutionary change in the natural environment of the American Southwest. Dubbed by pioneers "the land of little water," Arizona and its bordering states acquired an image of semiarid desert, of dry sand and cactus, of alkali and thirst. When Europeans first occupied what is now Arizona there existed exactly one natural lake-to be named Stoneman Lake-a few acres of snowmelt trapped inside a collapsed volcanic cone. Today there are more than 70 sizeable lakes, all man-made, scattered across the high plateaus, the Indian nations, the lofty forests, and the desert lowlands. Connecting these dammed-up reservoirs are ever-flowing rivers, some placid, some rapid. The land of little water, as if by a miracle, has become a boaters' paradise.

And we born-again Arizona mariners are no less eccentric, opinionated and determined than yachtsmen everywhere. Maybe moreso.

Time: December, 1857. The place: The Colorado River, running free 1450 miles from where it rises in the Rockies to the Sea of Cortez. Lt. Joseph C. Ives follows War department orders to find the head of navigation. A 50-foot stern-wheeler, built in Philadelphia, is shipped in sections to the mouth of the Colorado. Mechanics reassemble The Explorer, which then churns north through 350 miles of swift currents and shifting shallows. Near the present site of Hoover Dam, the paddle boat brings up on a submerged rock, sinks, and convinces Lieutenant Ives he has found the head of navigation.

Time: Ten years later. Place: Grand Canyon. James White is pursued by Indians. He abandons his horse, lashes a driftwood raft with his lariat, and plunges into the roaring river like a moth down a bathtub drain. Fourteen days later, White emerges, the first paleface boatman to negotiate the monster rapids of the gut of the Grand.

Time: Early this century. Place: The Crossing, at the confluence of Tonto Creek and the Salt River... and a local legend: A troop of wild Tonto Basin cowhands take it into their heads to go boating on the lake rising behind Roosevelt Dam. Their planks are rough-sawn pine, pried from an antique outhouse. Caulked with hemp and pitch, it floats!

Time: 1929. Place: Lees Ferry. Navajo Bridge is completed in Northern Arizona, putting out of business a ferry that served

Nautical fun in the sun

For nearly six decades. But that homely barge is remembered - trolleyed to a cable fore and aft, powered by poles, $3 a wagon, six-bits per animal.

Time: 1950. Place: Glen Canyon. Art Greene takes tourists to see Rainbow Bridge. But by conventional craft it is a 400-mile portage to Hite, Utah, where boats can be launched. Then it's a hundred mile float through 11 whitewater rapids. Art and his kinfolks get a marvelous idea. They bolt a World War II fighter plane engine, complete with reversed propeller, onto a scow. And upstream whoosh! they go to Rainbow.

Time: 1964. Place: San Diego. For $1500 Norman Conkle of Phoenix buys a surplus World War II military amphibious vehicle designated DUKW and nicknamed DUCK. It is brand-new. With the help of a wrench monkey, Norman gets it going. It is 31-feet long, eight-feet wide, and seven-feet high. All day, all night, and all the next day, Norman plugs at 15 to 30 mph, homeward bound. For years thereafter Norman commands excursions of as many as 50 sightseers at a time, to Canyon Lake up the Apache Trail.

Time: October, 1980. Place: Lake Havasu on the Colorado. Kathy Steele on water skis is slicing along at 70 mph. In the opinion of many, she is the best woman skier, ever, in Arizona, but on this day she cannot handle a surprise wave that slams against her side. She flips into the air and

The Land of Little Water Spawns A Paradise for Boaters

by Don Dedera

Boaters' Paradise

flops into the water; broken right leg. One year later, after conquering a fractured neck vertebra, broken jaw, and severed hand tendon, at age 39 Kathy wins the national speed skiing championship.

Time: The present. Place: Firebird Lake, near Phoenix. Boats built by Ernest and George Litchfield crouch at the starting line, then accelerate with a roar across a quarter-mile course. They reach 140 mph, and other, more powerful craft go 170. After 160 races and 30 wins, capturing purses ranging from $500 to $1200, the Litchfield brothers have retired. "We didn't even break even," says George, put into the hospital for nine months after a wreck. "You can't make money drag racing boats." All, a bit daft.

Fair to say, Arizona's pleasure boating began shortly after the turn of the century, on the cool, clear lake created behind Roosevelt Dam. Roosevelt became the nation's first big reclamation project, erected of massive blocks of granite by, among others, Apache laborers and Italian stone-cutters. Ducks, pelicans, and gulls quickly claimed the surface, and bass and perch prospered in the depths. Sailors, skiers, and even military seaplanes took to the 23-mile-long pond. (On the bottom in six fathoms in Cholla Bay reposes an entire fishing outfit-tin box, lures, sinkers, line, hooks, and license. I know. I lost it all overboard right there in 1952.) In the several decades following Roosevelt's completion, seven other dams were emplaced across central Arizona streams. On the Salt River downstream from Roosevelt, Horse Mesa Dam forms Apache Lake, accessible over a winding, throat-clutching, cliff-hanging dirt road. Apache thereby offers uncrowded fishin' holes for walleyes and bass, and long runs for skiers.

Next in the watery staircase comes Canyon Lake; Mormon Flat Dam, the stopper. Draped by the vertical curtains of the Superstition Mountains, this narrow lake is notorious for fluky winds and not a sailor's favorite. Then, downstream another step, is Stewart Mountain Dam and Saguaro Lake. Close as it is to Phoenix and other large cities, Saguaro some days seems loved to death, and its use must be limited by Tonto National Forest rangers.

Off to the east on the Gila lies a sometimes lake known as San Carlos. Often dry in periods of drought, San Carlos exposes a grassy bottom. Will Rogers once took in this view, and remarked, "If that was my lake, I'd mow it!" But it's a different story on the Verde River, whose flow usually can be depended on to form lakes named Bartlett and Horseshoe, and, on the Agua Fria, Lake Pleasant.

Did Isay Pleasant?

"Starboard! Coming through! Give me the right-of-way! Starboard, starboard, you (expletive deleted)."

The skipper of a 22-foot is addressing the captain of a sloop of similar size. The response, "If you hit us, you (term cen-sored), it will be your fault!"

The two sailboats crash together. More words.

These gents are having fun. Along with 100 other helmspersons in 13 classes, they are competing in a regatta sponsored by the Arizona Yacht Club on Lake Pleasant. Out in the desert away from high moun-tains, Pleasant enjoys clean winds, and is preferred by ragbaggers, but it is helpful to remember the name Pleasant derives from an engineer, not a human condition.

"Watching a yacht race is about as exciting as watching the grass grow," Ring Lardner long ago reported, and he was wrong. Sailboat racing can be as compet-itive as knife combat, and to knowing spectators, filled with skills, thrills, and spills. The sport is closer to amateur sta-tus than any racing of this day.

By now it may be an inbred trait, like curly hair or brown eyes or dimpled cheeks. Thirty-four hundred years ago, after his forebears wasted milleniums in the mercy of every blow, the first mariner thought to warp his sail. And then with the added leverage of a rudder, he went where he wanted to go, despite the direc-tion of the wind.

curly hair or brown eyes or dimpled cheeks. Thirty-four hundred years ago, after his forebears wasted milleniums in the mercy of every blow, the first mariner thought to warp his sail. And then with the added leverage of a rudder, he went where he wanted to go, despite the direc-tion of the wind.

That clever sailor (likely an Egyptian) gave humankind unprecedented freedom to travel, which fathered a new breed of explorers and adventurers: Vasco da Gama, Columbus, Magellan, Ericsson, Cook, Laffite, John Paul Jones. Eventually, to rule the sea was to own the land.Today the passion for sailing lives on. What human heart doesn't lift at the sight of an arc of sailcloth drawn full against a forceful sky? Who hasn't felt the urge to follow the pitch of a sensuous vessel down the troughs, and trim her canvas through jibes and tacks? These atavistic yearnings are fulfilled in Arizona by sailors of tiny Sunfish to offshore ocean racers confined to freshwater seas. Desert rats dump the sand from their boots and don cloth boat shoes to test their Lido 14s, Thistles, El Toros, Snipes, $500 cartop Carib Dories, and America's 100,000 all-time favorites, 14-foot Lasers. Arizonans and Arizona visitors spend their share for $20 snap

Boaters' Paradise

shackles, $150 high tensile Danforth anchors, and $1000 spinnakers. "A sailboat is a hole in the water that you fill with money.""I bought it because it looks like it's doing seven knots when it's tied up in the slip," explains a new boat owner, echoing an international madness. Arizonans likewise launch the latest in catamarans, such as the 20-foot Supercat, which may be (for the moment) the world's fastest production sailboat, bar none, capable of nudging speeds near 30 knots. Arizonans also have taken to a newer sport called windsurfing, combining the elements of surfboards and sails, in a lonely challenge of personal athletics. They band together in a half-dozen state organizations devoted to a common idea: sails on water, in the land of palms and cactus.And why not? In such a place, Egypt, it all began.

"Starboard, starboard, you ignoble descendant of an unmarried camel!"

Snow has fallen throughout the night in the Rim Country. In the winter of 1957, we awake snug and warm in our cabin near Tonto Creek. Limbs of the ponderosa pines sag under hundredweights of slushy flakes. It is early March, when at 5000 to 8000 feet along the Mogollon Rim, deep, moist Pacific storms can unload three feet of snow overnight. This fall now measures about a foot on the flat, and we ought to stay home.

But we have a plan, and are driven to see it through. A 1944 Willy milly Jeep awaits. Its four drive wheels are wrapped with chains. On the hitch, a trailer. On the trailer, a 14-foot aluminum rowboat.

Off we go, breaking a fresh track to Highway 260, where the snowplow has made a pass or two. We slither and slip up a trail overhanging 300-foot drops, grind around avalanches, and beat our feet on the metal floorboards to fight the cold. In about three hours our car arrives at an improbable scene. A black snowbound pond has formed in a conifer woodland. There are four of us - my brother Frank, Tom Sanford, I think, one other I've forgot - and we shuck off the ice and manhandle the boat to the water. For a few minutes we row about, taking turns, and then we haul out the boat for the threehour return.

We did this in order to be the first people to put a boat on Woods Canyon Lake. Such was the joy of Arizonans, to be given a new lake. Today these high country lakes abound. Dozens of them by now, they are blue, 50-acre gems developed by the Game & Fish Department, catchments first conceived by ranchers, and still other lakes created by Apache and Navajo tribes expressly for recreation. Supplemented by multi-purpose municipal reservoirs, Arizona's system of high country pools does not rival Minnesota, but it beats virtually none at all. The smaller sailboats flash like outsized butterflies on the forested azure lakes, and skiers find sufficient room on larger puddles like Lake Mary. But taken together, these are better for fishing for rainbows and brookies, browns and graylings. For the White Mountain Apaches their lakes foster a thriving recreational enterprise which includes a thousand campsites for reservation visitors.

Hard-won advice for the high country. It is best not to go in the dead of winter, during a storm.

Edward Abbey is another grown man. Famous writer. Maybe rich. Getting older.

Here he is in a kayak, hurtling down the San Juan River. He is wearing a life jacket in case of upset and separation from boat. His head looks like a bearded melon, in that he wears an orange helmet. He handles his double paddle deftly, but...Let's let him tell it: "One fellow misjudges the course of the current and gets his boat hung up for a time on a partly submerged snag. Another lets his Yak get too close to an overhanging wall. Jammed against the wall by the force of the river, his boat tips over, and he goes for a bitter swim. The life jacket keeps him from any danger of drowning; the real danger in cold March waters is hypothermia - freezing. But he is fished out, taken ashore, dried off, and warmed up by a quickly kindled bonfire. No harm done; and we all learn the lesson. From here on none of us will treat the San Juan with anything less than respect."

Kayaks, canoes, skiffs, Boston Whaler Harpoons, Yamaha quarter-tonners, Glastron cruisers trailerable, standup headroom, sleep four. You name it. Even hydroplanes on little Firebird Lake.

In the 1960s there were about 40,000 boats registered in Arizona; ten years later that number had jumped to 85,000; currently the state has assigned some 162,000 identification numbers. About 138,000 of these numbers grace the bows of craft kept by residents. The remainder are held by non-residents who operate the vessels mainly within the state. Of course, this counts only powered boats and boats over

Boaters' Paradise

In the 14 feet in length. Nor are they all cockleshells. Registered in Arizona are 257 boats in the 40-to-65-foot class. Most of these are moored at floating marinas on the really large inland seas, such as Powell, Mead, and Havasu along the Colorado. That's where Ed Abbey's San Juan eventually discharges. Of all of Art Greene's desperate boat stories, the prize had to do with those days when the untamed Colorado could transport 393,040 tons of silt past a single point in 24 hours, when the rapids of Glen Canyon could roar like a hundred freights, when disaster was a river boatman's constant companion.

"On one trip through Glen Canyon, an elderly man asked me to stop at the wreck of an antique gold dredge," Greene's tale goes. "He gathered up a few pieces of driftwood, and he built a fire and put on a pot of coffee. There were three of us, and he poured out three cups, and he said, 'Boys, I hope you enjoy this as much as I do. Long ago I spent $75,000 on this dredge, and before she could wash out an ounce of gold, the river wrecked her. Did you ever drink a $25,000 cup of coffee?" Today, Glen Canyon more resembles a millpond than a maelstrom. On its huge flat surface (rough at times) chug fleets of houseboats, tour ships to scenic marvels, 80 large motor yachts, and fishing, skiing, and camping boats seemingly beyond count. "Nothing in that country is the same," Art always said, and true. Lake Powell changes weather patterns downwind, loses oceans of water through its Navajo sandstone sidewalls to open distant springs, and drowns a virgin canyon so gorgeous, poets wept. But as with the other 12 dams along the Colorado, a bonus is relatively safe boating, where before it was a wild arena of upsets and fatalities, where a man would venture, as Art Greene would say, “only if he was plumb weak north of his ears.” From Glen Canyon's enormous power plant, the Colorado is unleashed for its race through Grand Canyon National Park. Humans being human, by now they have run the river in every imaginable way. Major John Wesley Powell who led the first intentional descent in 1869 was the nation's first bureaucrat, but he was no stuffed shirt. On the cathedral-quiet chasms between seething rapids, the onearmed veteran of Shiloh would amuse his nine companions with bellowed verses by Whittier: Old Floyd Ireson, for his hard heart, Tarred and feathered and carried in a cart By the women of Marblehead!

(Clockwise from far left) Sunrise at the Nautical Inn on Lake Havasu... Sunset sailors on Lake Pleasant north of Phoenix... Lake Powell's Wahweap Marina, one of five full-service marinas on the 180-mile-long lake... Jet skiing, a devilishly fun way to create your own water sport on any one of Arizona's long, long lakes.

Boaters' Paradise

The variegated breed followed Powell through the 161 nerve-rasping rapids in the 300 miles between Lees Ferry and Lake Mead. Cataract boats by the score went through, stern first. Scows crashed, killing crews. The Kolb brothers made a movie of that sort of thing, in 1911. Dock Marston putted down in the first motorboat, and doughty New Zealanders first fought up the rapids in jet boats in 1960. The first two trips down the Colorado by Georgie Clark, who did more to popularize river running than anyone else, were by life jacket, sans boat. But perhaps the unique saga belongs to Buzz Holstrom, a serious-minded, somewhat introverted gas station attendant from Oregon. He obtained a cedar log, sawed planks, fashioned a 15-foot skiff. Alone in October, 1937, he pushed off at Green River, Wyoming, and emerged, seven weeks later, at Lake Mead. Turning from fame and fortune, he said, "I find I have already had my reward, in the doing of the thing."

Mead makes another massive lake, another boating heaven. Behind Hoover Dam (enough concrete to make a two-lane highway coast to coast), Mead is managed by the National Park Service as a National Recreation Area.

Living today in Phoenix is Conservationist George Collins who, as a young Park Service ranger, was instrumental in originating the concept of playgrounds for the people.

Says Collins of that time, "We were given the privilege of surveying the entire Lower Colorado River Basin. Encouraged by visionary superiors, we drew up in broad brushstrokes the multiple use plans that prevail at present. It was obvious to me and my colleagues that a priceless recreational resource would evolve from the taming of the Colorado."

Bless his heart. Mead boasts six marinas, and the works in rentals, launching ramps, hostels, and eateries. Mead's shoreline varies from 550 to 822 miles, depending on how much water is being stored. As if Mead's altogether boating variety were not enough, many a mariner also takes in a tour of Hoover Dam's innards and a try at the tables of nearby Las Vegas.

Back there, in the 1920s, when he let his imagination go, I wonder if George Collins foresaw Sammy Davis Jr. singing for $100,000 a week in a casino on The Strip?

A journalist takes a latter-day, broad-brush view of that stretch of water trickling southward from Lake Mead.

"It happens all the time. No matter what the season, they pack up lock, stock, and barrel, and it continues. It. The migration. People headed for the Colorado River.

"They're pilgrims in RVs. From Yuma to Hoover Dam, they line the 313 miles of river with trailers, campers, motor homes, tents, squares of canvas stretched across poles. They bring every description of boat, fishing lure, motorbike, scuba gear, water ski, inner tube, beach ball, and raft. Beer and diet colas, suntan oil and cooking oil, hot dogs and T-bones, TV sets and hiking boots, swimsuits and blue jeans. They pack it, and they use it. And they check in from everywhere."

A ranger talks about that section called the Parker Strip, "It's phenomenal. We put about a million people a year through this area alone."

Most are Californians, lemmings in retreat. What do they do?

Old folks live out their Social Security on salt cedar shaded plots, fishing and frogging along the fertile sloughs. Party parties make up six-somes for houseboat romps out of Katherine Landing into Lake Mohave. Water nymphs wear tee shirts asking, "Where the hell is Bullhead City," and that fair community is where it always was, below Davis Dam. Intrepid anglers brave the surge above Willow Beach for lunker rainbows. Hang-glider pilots go aloft in kites towed by speedboats, and deftly land on a postage stamp lawn at London Bridge. The more serene contract for a quiet canoe paddle through Topock Gorge and Topock Marsh with hundreds of species of birds, resident and temporary, at Havasu National Wildlife Refuge. On the Colorado, people seem to race anything that floats, in an endless summer of competition. Parker Seven Hour Enduro. Water skiing 50-mile marathon. National jet boat races at Blue Water Marina. The seven-mile Colorado River Inner Tube Race. The rival "World Championship" inner tube race at Yuma. And the jet-ski doings on Lake Moovalya.

It is said that Californians set the trends for the nation, for the world, maybe for the Universe. The most numerous of Americans, they populate a state which, if a nation, would have the eighth largest economy on planet Earth. Californians early determine our tastes in cars, in foods, in clothing, in life-style, in recreation.

Get ready. For if this is true, some day soon we will all be driving 10 hours non-stop to burn up the engines of $35,000 speedboats under the admiring view of tanned and curvaceous young women attired in the scantiest of swimsuits.

It could be the wave of the future, in Arizona, the land of lots of water.