A Boat and A Lake: Jumping in the Deep End Part 1

We just returned from our summer vacation - spending almost a week (6 days / 5 nights) exploring Lake Powell (Arizona & Utah) on a houseboat. While we have visited this part of the country before (and we love it!), it was our first experience on the lake and our first time in a houseboat. Each day this week I'll show you pictures from our trip - grouped into themes.

Today's theme: The Houseboat

It was just the 2 of us, so we rented the smallest possible houseboat, 46 feet, out of the Wahweap Marina, near Page, Arizona. Here is a shot of "our" houseboat (X11) waiting quietly for us at the marina.

As you can see, there is an open upper deck - great for watching sunsets and dancing - complete with a water slide. On the "ground" level there is a main compartment (with air conditioning!) and small front and back open-air spaces.

The back (stern) open-air space contained the 2 outboard engines, panel access to the generator and the gasoline tanks. This is also where we carried the rental kayak.

The front (bow) open-air space had 12 plastic deck chairs, a large cooler and a propane grill - along with the 2 anchors (note 2 heaps of rope - or "line" - in front) that figured prominently in our trip (a bit of foreshadowing there!).

See (below) the 2 lounge chairs on the upper deck? Don't they look comfy? Did you notice that they are not secured to anything? No, we didn't either. At least, not at first... (More foreshadowing!)




Inside the main compartment was a small back bedroom, a small restroom and a relatively large living space, that included a sofa (convertible to a bed), a dining room table (convertible to a bed)...

and a full kitchen (with island) - refrigerator, oven, microwave, coffee maker, blender, toaster - the works! I carefully planned out a full menu for the entire 6 days and prepared a shopping list. A local grocery store delivered everything right to the boat for us!

And, of course, the most important bit - the helm!

The houseboat is pretty much an RV loaded onto a motorized pontoon boat, so previous experience with any type of motorboat (we had none) and/or previous experience with an RV (we had none) would have been extremely helpful.

But, don't worry - they did give us almost an hour of instruction before turning us loose for a week on the lake with this massive piece of complex machinery worth several hundreds of thousands of dollars... ;)

Tomorrow I'll show you pictures from when we were underway and the beautiful scenery around Lake Powell.