I've alot of great memories of that place...Caught alot of fish out of there too. We've many pictures of multiple limits of big corvina......My dad and I used to gig bullfrogs in the marshes around the New and Alamo rivers too. I typically held the light in the frogs eyes...and my dad would gig um.
Had some weird experiences there too....once we were near the Southern end ( Red Hill Marina..) of the sea...and a great desert wind came up...blowing approx. south to north. The sea dropped nearly 2 ft. in the marina after that wind died down. Then there was the day...my mom was out in the boat with us....and it was probably 110 degrees in the shade...she got soo hot she said, "I'm burning up, I'm going swimming"...Well we were way, way out there...( I remember that sea/lake being around 20 miles long, and 10 or so miles wide...) and my mom decided not to jump in...( because the water was ugly looking, and smelled bad...even back then..) but just eased feet first over the side, and to everyone's amazement she stood on the bottom. It was a good thing ...she didn't dive in..!! Ha!!
Anyway...this article...brought back some nice memories. Thanks for posting......
FRegards,
Here's what I got from the story.
Apparenlty when the federal government built Hoover Dam they entered into agreements with quasi-government agencies rather than States regarding the storage and dispersal of water stored in Lake Mead. Although many articles mention California's or Nevada's or Arizona's rights they are actually the rights of state chartered water districts within those states.
The arguments today appear to be two fold. First, what will these indiviual water districts do with their water and second, if these districts, who have the lions share of the stored water, don't use all their allocted water, who gets to use the left over?
It appears that the state of California wants the water districts, chartered by the state, to voluntarily share their water with urban areas who have no rights to the water and that the feds want these same districts to better manage their water so that the savings can be shared with districts that don't have as large a share. "Better manage" in fedspeak for "stop using so much".
Compounding this problem are Californians who centered their livelyhoods on an artifical, agricultural, run off sump and extreme enviornmentals who are trying to tie that same sump to natural species preservation.
The problem with the traditional livelyhood argument is that the source of the water is artifical and the problem with the enviornmental argument is temporal. From a species standpoint, the sump is not longlived enough to have a significant impact on natural species.
It is also apparent from between the lines that neither the states nor the feds have the legal authority to resolve the problem without the voluntary cooperation of these water districts. The state of California can apparently only use political and public relations pressure on the water rights holders and the feds can only demand that the terms of the controlling contracts must be followed. The enviornmentalist and livelyhood folks can only threaten economic hardships through the expense of litigation on these same water districts.
Not withstanding the above sidebars, the irony of these total proceedings does not change the fact that the Salton Sea is a man made drainage pond for agricutural runoff that served multipul purposes when the supply of water behind Hoover Dam was in excess of the public need.