History - Top 6 - Low Water

The Number Five Rockvam Story is… Low water! We remember the high water of 2014, but how many remember the drought of the late '80s and early '90s? I’ll bet many of our former crew remember it all too well. Former Crew members… if you’re reading, make sure to join RockvamAlumni.com – K? Back to the story.

Here’s why our former crew remember the low water… when you work at Rockvam’s, one daily job is to rake the beach. We do this so it looks nice AND so the weeds don’t have a chance to grow. Well, raking the beach on a normal lake level is a chore, but it’s only a couple feet deep. Now imagine when the lake elevation dropped to 925.4 OR as the photo shows… a 40’ deep beach revealed itself! (In the photo, it's usually dry one section of dock... look at where the phone is, it's still in the same location!) Back in the day, our gas dock was a "stick dock" and the dock attendants had to walk UNDER the dock slips to rake… it was dry eight slips out from shore!

It was an awful situation for boating, in fact, many of the “big boats” relocated to the river to maintain boating because you couldn’t access slips around the lake, they were dry. We tore out the old dock and installed the floating dock because of the low water. We even had a temporary permit to push the new floating dock out further to get access to deeper water. In fact, for one summer, our first slips were where the gas pumps are currently located! That made the dock really long! (imagine forgetting something in your car with that walk!) But… that’s how low the water was.

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