Why do you hate dangling rope? Being the only fuel stop for 150
Miles, I would think any powell hipster would be grateful for it.
I guess I should say I hate the marina... but I have had bad experiences there that I could have avoided had I done something different. That said, I sincerely dislike dangling rope because they are the only fuel stop for about 40 miles when coming back down lake and they don't always operate during posted hours.
Long story... but...
This last September, I was coming back from Rainbow Bridge (had about 35 gallons when I left Wahweap) and we were on our way back around 4:45 stopped at DRM at about 5:15 (4:15PM MT) and the fuel dock was empty. My fuel light wasn't on yet, but the indicator showed under a quarter tank... so I didn't want to chance it.
Tried to hail the dock on channel 16, nothing... tried to hail NPS and then my handheld died.
Found out that the USB charger was on the houseboat instead of the ski boat so I didn't have any way of charging the rechargable non-battery-replacable radio...
Looked at my AT&T cell phone with 94% battery life and a big fat zero bars of coverage.
Had someone in the boat with Verizon try to call someone (they had 2 bars about 3/4 the way up the marina) but they had their kid playing on their cell phone so they had 1% battery life left. call went through, phone died 2 seconds later.
Plugged in their phone to the radio (fortunately had an older iphone cable) and it sat at 1% for about 10 minutes. Found out there were about 200 apps open, closed all of them and let the phone charge to 7%
THEN we called my wife on the houseboat and told her to hail NPS to try and get someone to come back down to the fuel dock (by now it's still light, but it's about 6:30 PM MT).
We give her time and call her back about 10 minutes later and she says the park ranger will come down to the dock to meet us.
... right about now it's starting to get dark ... and you know LP, when the lights go out, it gets REALLY dark. But I've navigated LP in the dark before with my spotlight and Navionics.
Nothing happens for about 45 minutes. Then we see a truck come down from the camp up on the hill and we meet the park services guy.
NPS guy talks to us for a few minutes in kind of a "why did you take me from my TV" attitude. Talk to him for a few minutes and I tell him, "look I only need about 5-6 gallons of fuel" and then I will put back at 2.6MPG economy to Wahweap (which is about 35 miles away). I figured I had about 6 gallons left in the tank (turns out I had 9). He tells me that I can't drive at night. I tell him, that I've had plenty of experience driving around LP at night. He tells me that I'm not allowed and that I'll have to stay the night at the marina.
We go back and forth for a couple of minutes, and eventually I ask him why he wouldn't just help me find some fuel in cans or call the fuel station guy down to unlock one of the pumps... NPS guy tells me that PWC's aren't allowed to be underway when it's this dark...
I /facepalm and tell him I'm in a 24' boat with AAWL, Nav lights, dock lights, spot lights, and Navionics... and then the "why did you take me from my TV" attitude from the NPS guy is completely gone.
He tells me that the call came in that a Yamaha was stranded out of fuel at dangling rope, but was in no immediate danger. So he rummages around looking for fuel, but doesn't find any in his stores.
We end up packing our things and stayed up in the Rec center behind DRM (up a super steep hill), which wasn't all that bad (dusty, but not all that bad - would have rather stayed on the boat w/ my boat cover on).
The NPS guy was really cool with us after this, got us squared away great (or at least as well as uninvited guests can be).
I grabbed a bunch of these oversized beach towels that I purchased for the trip (because everyone kept stealing mine), and we ended up using those for blankets.
While we're up there... one of the guys came in to work out and introduces himself to my friends wife... tells her that he's the fuel dock manager and all of our jaws drop (I don't think any of us were looking forward to staying in the rec center overnight).
We tell him what's going on and he says to us that the fuel dock shouldn't have been closed when we came by, etc and that he'd go open it up for us if it were still light out. So he tells us that he'd go and open the fuel dock early the next day at 7:30 instead of at 8 like normal so we could get on our way.
The next morning rolls around and 7:30 comes and goes. 8:00 (normal opening hours) comes and goes... 8:30 and we start to see people coming down the hill and then the fuel dock gets opened.
Guy removes a padlock and goes into the office and pushes a button and that's all it took.
So... like I say, I don't hate the marina, it's a luxury to have as far as food/ice cream/etc goes. But it sure would have been nice to not have gone through that.
All this said, lessons learned:
- Fill up all the time, I thought about filling up on the way to Rainbow Bridge... I assure you I was kicking myself for not having done so.
- Have a fixed mounted VHF in your boat unless you boat on a pond (got a great one now, just have to put it on this spring)
- Don't use AT&T, I already switched to Verizon!
- Keep an extra USB charger/cable in the boat (for HH VHF) in case you forget it on the houseboat...
- Don't tell NPS that you're in a Yamaha, just say 24' red & black boat ;-), if you need help any time near dark.
- Get better economy impellers for lake powell that are pitched just perfect (taking into account the mods that I made). Ordered those today - called Impro's every other day... sent them an email and 10 minutes later they called me back .
- Travel in a pack. I need a bigger pack! We usually only have 15-20 people with us on the houseboat and unless we're going out wakeboard/surf/tube/etc water sporting, then it's very uncommon for us to take multiple boats. Having a larger group (more boats) with us on the expedition would have helped. That said, we had a fishing boat that was back at the slip just sitting there.
