For first time in 4 years, dam is up at Healdsburg Veterans Memorial Beach in Sonoma County

Not today, but soon.

That was the message to 11-year-old Devin Davenport and his mother, Lisa, when they stopped by Healdsurg’s Veterans Memorial Beach late Monday morning.

The Davenports had asked a worker at the county park when the dam holding back the waters of the Russian River would be finished — when the narrow riverbed would once again be transformed to an expansive, seven-foot-deep swimming area.

That beloved local tradition hadn’t taken place since 2019. Meager rainfall and drought conditions had forced the county to forego this seasonal dam for three straight summers, starting in 2020.

But now the dam is back, following the wettest rainy season in years: 42 inches fell on Sonoma County from Oct. 1, 2022, to May 24, 2023, according to the National Weather Service.

“We should be looking good by the end of the week,” said Corbin Johnson, a project specialist with Sonoma County Regional Parks.

Brisk flows on the river were very similar, he said, to those recorded in June of 2019, the last time the dam was installed. That year, once the dam’s panels were in place, “it took about three days to fill up,” he recalled.

“I’m pretty confident we’ll be open for this weekend.”

As of Wednesday evening, a note on the park’s webpage read: “Dam installation is scheduled to end Thursday, June 29 at 3 p.m., and the beach will reopen at that time.“

That was great news to Lisa Davenport, who uses Mom’s Beach and Steelhead Beach, closer to her Forestville home, but has an especially strong attachment to this park, across the street from Wicked Slush and just south of the iconic truss spans of the Healdsburg Memorial Bridge.

“My Dad was a park ranger, and I used to come here with him, quite a few years back. This is where I learned to swim.”

On a grassy area above the beach, a cheerful man in gray sweatpants was measuring out lengths of lane lines, soon to be unfurled in the rising waters.

This was Jim Boyce, supervising lifeguard at this park, where he’s worked for decades. This beach, he said, “has been a shell of itself the last few years.”

That’s not to say it hasn’t drawn some big crowds. Ever since the county lifted stay-at-home orders imposed early during the COVID-19 pandemic, people have flocked to its river parks, including this one, lack of dam be damned.

But the installation of the dam, Boyce believes, restores this recreational area to its “full glory” — an exalted state captured in black and white photos in his office.

“I love the history of this place,” he said, pointing to a poster of a giant swan, at least 20 feet long, floating beneath the bridge at a water carnival more than a century ago. Another photograph captures a diving board on a floating dock.

In those days, the impounded water was allowed to reach depths of 10 feet. Today, it’s seven feet — more than enough to make this an ideal stretch of river for open water swimming, said Boyce.

While parking is $7, admission to the beach is free, as are loaner life vests available to those who request them.

Before visitors can venture past the lane line marking where the water is 3 ½-feet deep, they must pass a test administered by lifeguards, proving they can swim 25 yards. Those who pass the test get a yellow bracelet.

Surprisingly, said Boyce, the beach is a bit safer when the dam is up and the water is deeper.

When there is no dam and the river is shallow, parents barbecuing on the grass up to 150 yards away aren’t as worried about little ones who might wander to the water, unsupervised. Last year, lifeguards at this beach made “over 10 rescues,” said Boyce, more than half of those involving toddlers whose parents weren’t watching them.

When the river isn’t dammed, “we have a skeleton crew,” said Boyce. When it’s been installed, “we have a full staff.”

On Monday a lifeguard named Vlad worked alongside a half dozen other regional park employees as they waded through waist deep water, sliding wooden sections into a half-dozen “bays” in the middle of the dam.

It would’ve been easy to complete the project sooner. But the permit issued to the park system by California’s Department of Fish and Wildlife specifies that, during installation, the dam cannot lower downstream water levels more than 1.2 inches every 15 minutes.

That gives creatures on the river’s edge “time to move into the water,” explained Johnson.

Some people are inherently suspicious of dams, he noted. “They think the dam is taking water, but it’s not. We’re not using it, we’re not diverting it. We’re just backing it up.”

His ensemble on this morning included a hardhat, life jacket and checkered shorts purchased at Target, he believed, and now soaked from his forays into the water.

“I’m primarily based out of the office, so for me, this is especially nice, to get out and work on a project that makes so many people happy,” he said.

“It looks relatively simple, but it’s pretty amazing how it all comes together.

“It’s really a cool thing.”

You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy at austin.murphy@pressdemocrat.com or on Twitter @ausmurph88.