Lake Mendocino boat ramp reopened

UKIAH - Recent rains have replenished Lake Mendocino enough to allow its south boat ramp to be reopened. But the storms also muddied the water and littered it with potentially motor-damaging debris, keeping most boaters at bay.

“I’ve been the only one out there,” said Ukiah resident David Nelson, a retired public health officer who was kayaking on the lake under Friday’s clear blue sky.

It’ll be a couple of weeks before the waters clear and boaters start taking advantage of the rising lake levels, said Mike Spencer, who sells fishing gear at Pacific Outfitters in Ukiah.

After months of appearing more like a giant mud hole than a lake, the reservoir is now at more than 80 percent of capacity and within the 10-year average water level for this time of year. On Christmas Day, it held more than 55,000 acre-feet of water. An acre-foot is 325,851 gallons, enough to fill a football field with a foot of water. The latest water levels were not available Friday on the Army Corps of Engineers website.

Army Corps officials said the reopening of the north boat ramp, the lake’s second launch point, depends on the weather bringing more rainfall.

Despite the current lull in the rain and the temporary reduction in a water diversion that feeds the lake, it continues to rise, though more slowly.

“We’ve been getting more inflow than outflow,” said J.D. Hardesty, chief of public affairs for the San Francisco office of the Army Corps of Engineers, which operates Lake Mendocino.

On Thursday, the minimum required amount of water - 25 cubic feet per second - was being released from the reservoir, while 206 cfs of water was flowing into the lake.

The lake would be filling faster if the Potter Valley tunnel had not been tamped down for repairs on some power plant valves. The century-old tunnel shunts water from the Eel River above Potter Valley through a mountain to a PG&E power plant where the flow spins giant turbines to generate electricity. From there, the water is carried by irrigation canals to a branch of the Russian River, then into Lake Mendocino.

The repair project is expected to take just over three months. Meanwhile, the tunnel continues to deliver about 32 cfs of water, said Janet Pauli, who heads the Potter Valley Irrigation District, a beneficiary of the water. The tunnel’s maximum delivery is about 250 cfs, but it’s rare for that amount to be let down the tunnel, she said.

It’s more important to have that water flowing in the spring, when more water can be held in Lake Mendocino for the dry months.

In the winter months, the Army Corps is required to keep the lake at lower levels to protect against downstream flooding and dam failure. Two years ago, the requirement led to the Army Corps’ releasing a large amount of water in anticipation of storms that never came. Local water agencies said it added up to a loss of about 24,000 acre-feet, an amount that would have made a significant difference during the drought.

Legislators and agency officials are working on ways of making the water-release schedule more flexible, Hardesty said.

Lake Mendocino’s recent rise has given area residents hope that the drought is coming to an end.

“It’s wonderful,” Nelson said of the lake’s recovery so far.

Ukiah residents Cherie Franklin and John Hempsmyer also were buoyed by the growing lake, even though they hadn’t caught any fish from the shoreline since the storms muddied the water.

“Nature’s turning,” Franklin said.

You can reach Staff Writer Glenda Anderson at 462-6473 or glenda.anderson@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @MendoReporter.