Quote of The Week:

"Retirement life is a game. Happy people are the players. Unhappy people are the spectators. Which would you like to be?
from Ernie Zelinski's How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free"

— Ernie J. Zelinski

This evening Sandy, Ken and I went for another boat ride on the reservoir. One of the Rangers, Don West, had been trying to schedule a time when he could take us on a little tour. But it seemed like everytime we had it worked out, something came up and we couldn't do it. Well, we finally were able to do it this evening.

One of the park maintenance employees, Tom, stays in a small apartment at Big eddy, which is a large marina, but is also the location of the parks administrative offices. Tom has an apartment in Clarkston, WA, but that is over an hour drive one way, so he stays in the apartment during the week and goes home on weekends. Instead of driving a car back and forth, he rides in the parks boat to and from work. In fact, most of the rangers and some other staff use the boat, because they can travel to the park in 12 minutes in the boat versus almost an hour by car.

So Don was going to take Tom back to Big Eddy at the end of Tom's shift, and since Don had to come back to the park anyway, he invited us along for our ride. Jenny didn't come because she was involved in some other things.

It was a lot of fun, and much cooler on the water as long as we were moving. But the few times we had to slow down in no wake zones, the sun was beating on my and Sandys backs and it was HOT!! But we didn't slow down that many times, so it wasn't too bad.

Don was telling us that since July 3rd, when they started drawing down the reservoir, it had dropped 25 feet. We asked him how much further they would take it down, and he said it would be a total of 80 feet! Holy cow! If you look at some of the pictures, you can see where the water levels were on July 3rd and where they are now. That is 25 feet. Now imagine that the water is going to drop more than twice that amount before they're all done. WOW!

He was explaining how the docks at Big Eddy are controlled by 8 huge winches, two of which are out on platforms in the reservoir (I didn't get a picture of them - drat!). They use the 8 winches to control the drop of the docks in unison with the drop in the water level. Right now, they have to adjust the docks every day, and sometimes even twice in one day. It's really amazing when you think about it.

( More Reservoir Pictures )