Drought Puts the Squeeze on Recreation : Water: The number of visitors at the state’s lakes has fallen as shorelines recede. But entrepreneurs insist there will be plenty of water this summer for boaters.

Tom Lingham’s quest for water is reaching epic, even mythic, proportions.

In attempting to keep his little fleet of rental boats afloat, Lingham has chased the receding waters of Lake Cachuma hundreds of yards by building stairs and gangways to docks that he keeps relocating across newly dry lakeside slopes and flats. And still the water tries to elude him.

Despite recent storms, the five-year drought has shrunk the popular lake in Santa Barbara County to 15% of its capacity. Intrepid boaters and anglers look high above their heads at stark cliffsides that are normally under water. Bicyclists ride on a highway that had been at the lake’s bottom for more than 30 years. Business at Lingham’s Cachuma Lake Boat Rentals is down 65% over the last four years.

Similar scenes are repeated on drought-parched lakes throughout California.

Still, Lingham and many of his counterparts at California lakes insist there will be plenty of water for recreation this summer. They maintain that a large part of their problem is a result of aesthetics--people don’t like to look at naked banks--and of the public’s misconception that California’s lakes have dried up.

“I feel we’ll be operating this spring and summer and fall,” Lingham predicted.

Aesthetics and misconceptions aside, government officials say that--even with recent rains--California’s 155 major reservoir-lakes are only about 40% full on the average. Even after spring runoff, the lakes are not expected to reach normal levels. Some are expected to be drastically low and some might even be unusable for recreation, officials say.

Here is a sampling of recent lake conditions throughout the state:

* Lake Cachuma, which attracts 1 million people a year during normal times, has dropped more than 80 feet and could shrink to 9% of its capacity by the end of August.

* Castaic Lake, a double reservoir in Los Angeles County that is visited by 1.5 million boaters and swimmers a year, has had its water supply shut off by the state Department of Water Resources because of the drought. The upper lake is down more than 70 feet from high water, and county recreation officials do not expect the lower lake to be suitable for beach swimming this summer.

* Lake Isabella in Kern County, which before the drought drew more than 1.5 million people a year for boating, fishing and swimming, is down to one-third of the water it normally holds. Some boat-launching ramps have been left high and dry. A late buildup of snowpack is expected to bring the lake back to above last summer’s level by early June, but still far below average.

* Big Bear Lake in San Bernardino County, which draws 250,000 boaters per year, is expected to be down to about 60% of normal by summer, depending on late rain and whether water must be drained for agricultural use.

* Lake Oroville in Butte County, which attracts about 700,000 people a year, is down more than 100 feet from normal. By summer, officials fear the lake will be so low that it will be inaccessible for recreation.

* Lake Shasta in Shasta County, which logs 2.5 million visitors during normal times, is down to 37% of its capacity and is expected to be only 13% full by fall.

All this could change somewhat if California receives late torrential rains or if water officials reduce the flow of irrigation to farmers or otherwise revise water policy. But no one is predicting a normal year of water sports no matter what happens.

Even so, few people whose lives are linked to the lakes seem to be giving up.

“I’m going to be here when this lake dries up,” said Lingham at Lake Cachuma. “I’m going to be here in business waiting for the rain to come. . . . I’m not going to leave.”

When it comes to optimism, Ron Klievoneit, who runs the French Gulch Marina at Lake Isabella, meets the classic definition: His lake is not two-thirds empty, it is one-third full.

Undaunted by the receding water, Klievoneit points out that there are still more than 2,000 surface acres of lake for recreation. That’s the equivalent, he says, of more than 2,000 football fields--a comparison that lake people like to make.

Last year, during the fourth year of the drought, the irrepressible Klievoneit built a new dock, with new boat slips and a new tackle shop. It is as though he was constructing his own Dock of Dreams: If I build it, the rain will come.

He stood recently on the dock and watched hopefully as the first faint raindrops of an approaching storm pattered on the new boards at his feet.

“Lookie here,” he grinned. “We got a monsoon going.”

In the mountains of San Bernardino County, Big Bear Municipal Water District officials were optimistic after recent rains brought the dwindling lake level up a foot.

“If we keep going into the wet pattern (of weather) we’re going to be no worse than we were last year,” said Robert L. Freier, operations superintendent. “But Mother Nature still rules.”

Big Bear water officials have made trade-offs to keep the lake up. They sell water to nearby ski resorts where it is used to make snow, with the expectation that half of it will return to the lake as runoff. The money is used to buy state water for farmers “down the hill,” as they say, who have rights to irrigation water from Big Bear Lake.

District officials say this juggling has in the past saved the water district from having to siphon lake water to meet its commitment to farmers. But this year, state water may not be available because of the drought and the lake might have to be tapped, which could prove a hardship.

Nevertheless, Jere Mitchell, general manager of the water district, is predicting a good summer for lake recreation, considering the circumstances.

“It looks like our lake is going to be usable through the summer,” he said. “But it’s going to be less desirable than we’d like.”

Up at Lake Oroville in Butte County, officials are not so optimistic.

“The real problem is lack of access to (boat) launching,” said Harold Bradshaw, district superintendent of Lake Oroville State Park. “Fishing is just as good and there is a lot of water out there that is great water-skiing and great boating water, (but) the state did not anticipate (a lake) drawdown of this nature. . . . We don’t have the facilities to accommodate the public at these levels.”

Bradshaw said two marina operators who rent boats from docks are still in business at “great inconvenience.”

Already down more than 100 feet, Lake Oroville could be brought down another 25 feet or so to supply irrigation water to farmers, Bradshaw said.

“I don’t think we would ever close it,” he said of lake recreation. “It just, you might say, close itself.”

Farther north, at Lake Shasta, U.S. Forest Service District Ranger Wayne Eddy has been watching the largest man-made reservoir in California shrink before his eyes.

The lake is down more than 100 feet and holds only about one-third of its capacity of 4.5-million acre-feet of water. The lake’s surface area of 30,000 acres when it is full has been cut approximately in half.

And the worst is yet to come. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which controls Shasta Dam, has indicated that the lake will be cut to 13% of its holding capacity by fall to provide hydroelectric power and irrigation for farmers.

Eddy put the best face on it that he could.

“It’s still a lot of water compared to what you’ll see elsewhere,” he said.