Back in Arizona for winter boating season on Lake Pleasant

[DesertAlbin736]

Made it back out on Lake Pleasant near Phoenix for a Halloween raftup party with our Lake Pleasant Sailing Club group. Last gasp for warm to hot weather, high on Saturday 10/31 was 82. Today we're in the low 70s as a cold front rolls in from the Pacific. We can look forward to the next few months of temps in the 60s & 70s, with occasional cold spells in the 50s during December & January.

10 boats in all rafted up, all sailboats except us and one other power boat, a C-Dory 25. These pics taken during early stages of building the raftup with these 5 boats. Another 5 came along later.

The Seaward 26RK at far right in the bottom picture is the same boat we met up with in Garrison Bay on San Juan Island during our summer 2014 cruise to Washington State & BC, Canada.

The lake level is down about 30 ft from full, as it usually is this time of year. Lake Pleasant is a pumped storage reservoir for the Central Arizona Project canal system (CAP) bringing water from the Colorado River to Phoenix and Tucson. Starting this month they will begin pumping water 1,300 ft uphill in elevation from Lake Havasu at 400 ft above sea level (a section of the Colorado dammed up to form the lake) to fill Lake Pleasant to it's full level of 1,702 ft above sea level. That will take from now to sometime in March of next year. In the summer starting in June they will begin to draw down to supply municipal and agricultural needs while generating power in the process.

[Mark Deeser]

Nice pictures, hope they don't take to much water. Thanks, Mark.

[DesertAlbin736]

This is about as low as the lake will get this year. CAP will start pumping soon if the haven't started already, and by March it'll be full. Even now the deepest parts of the lake are over 100 ft deep. In those pictures we were anchored in 30 feet of water even that close to shore, as you can see the bottom slopes as steeply as the hill.