Well Done Job : San Marcos Official Targets Likely Spots to Drill for Water

People pursue strange things to keep their lawns green.

San Marcos City Councilman Corky Smith lent his abilities as a water dowser six months ago to a friend, and now, two very wet wells later, Palomar College is considering exploring a site for water recommended by Smith.

“Corky came out with his peach tree branch and found a few spots that he said would be a good place to drill a well,” said Michael Gregoryk, the junior college’s vice president of administrative services.

The college, whose own geology professor inspected the site and agreed it might be a good spot, will dig a $7,000 test well before committing to a $23,000 well, Gregoryk said.

“We didn’t just rely on him to decide where to put our well down. We looked at it as one more means of identifying potential water sources,” Gregoryk said.

Others, including the San Marcos city manager, were more enthusiastic in singing Smith’s praises.

“I’m not skeptical of what you would call old-wives’ approaches to things, because I’ve seen so many of them work over the years,” said City Manager Rick Gittings, for whom Smith found a well site.

The well spurts 53 gallons a minute to irrigate his lawn and garden, Gittings said.

Smith himself is not really sure how he does it.

“I take a green, forked limb and start walking around where they would like to have the water well, and see if I can find any,” said Smith, who has been a city councilman since 1980.

“I just keep walking around until it bends down. There really isn’t all that much to it,” said Smith, a 61-year-old retired plumber.

“I don’t really know what it is. The Lord has just given me some sort of gift and that’s it,” he said. “I’m one of 11 kids, and I’m the only one who has it, whatever it is. My own son can’t do it.”

Smith said he first learned he had the ability to dowse nearly 40 years ago when he was visiting relatives in Arkansas. After working as a plumber finding abandoned water lines in Camp Pendleton, he retired in 1970, and also retired from dowsing, he said.

It wasn’t until February, when his friend Charlie Sherman in San Marcos told him he planned to drill a well, that Smith felt his talents had been called on again.

“Charlie mentioned one morning that he was going to drill a well but didn’t know where, and so I told him I would go and witch it for him,” Smith said.

The well now produces 93 gallons a minute, Smith said.

Most geologists, however, say dowsers are hit-and-miss propositions at best.

“Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Nobody has ever demonstrated to me that there is any scientific basis behind it, and I think it’s just luck,” said Barry Bevier, a geotechnical engineer with Group Delta Consultants in San Diego.

“If somebody went out there without their willow stick and said, ‘Dig here,’ they’d have just as much luck as someone who dowses it,” said Bevier, who doesn’t believe in dowsing, even though his own grandfather used to dowse wells while Bevier was growing up in Michigan.

Scientists also have labeled dowsing bunk.

“There have been attempts to prove it or show that it works several times in the past, and every time it has been shown to have no better success than random drilling,” said David Hughes, a professor of geology at San Diego State University.

“Fundamentally, it falls into the same category of any mysticism. People believe it because they want to believe in it,” he said.