Unhappy Campers : Lake Casitas: Young and old flock to the area to get away from it all. But some of the visitors can be too close for comfort.

Beneath a drooping eucalyptus tree at Lake Casitas, 30 to 40 members of the Serbin, Diaz, Garcia and Aguas families whooped and stomped to Ecuadoran dance music blaring from a tape player.

A grinning woman perched on a picnic table and waved a flashlight over the crowd, the flickering beam turning the dusty campsite into an outdoor disco.

Inside tents just a few yards away, campers who were unrelated to the family bash grumbled to themselves.

This was supposed to be their quiet camp-out in the great outdoors.

Instead, it was a typically noisy weekend in one of the 455 campsites crammed into 300 acres of land on the northern shore of Ojai’s Lake Casitas.

On summer weekends, with an average of 3.5 campers at each site, Lake Casitas Recreation Area becomes a small town, bustling with life beneath a veil of campfire smoke.

Boy Scouts chase frogs through three creeks that feed the lake.

Retirees munch grilled hot dogs at some of the 766 picnic tables.

Anglers pull fat bass from the lake’s 2,261 surface acres of water.

And more than a few otherwise urbane professionals drink themselves into a stupor, tossing most of their empties into the park’s 32 trash bins.

It is, by most accounts, the most popular and successful campground in Ventura County.

The lake was created as a hedge against drought in 1956 by a group of citrus growers, cattle ranchers and civic leaders who formed the Lake Casitas Municipal Water District. The district borrowed $31 million to dam a stream running through 6,000 acres of federally owned land, then built the campgrounds that it manages today.

Swimming is prohibited, to protect the lake as a supply of drinking water, but boating of all kinds is allowed, since filtration can clean out any chemical wastes, said Doug Ralph, park manager.

The district tries never to turn away campers--even on Memorial Day Weekend, Ralph said.

This year, holiday crowds forced the district to let visitors have 400 extra sites in picnic areas and in a grassy meadow outside the gates--for the same $10 fee charged at the regular sites.

“The more we can bring in, the closer we can make to paying our way,” Ralph said. “We’d like to get to that point.”

The park has been running in the red since the 1970s, with a budget this year that will reach nearly $1 million, and annual income of only $770,000 from camping fees, Ralph said. The district pays the difference.

“This place gets so packed,” said Ranger Brent Doan, one of a handful of rangers and staff members who keep order at the park. “Most of the people seem to have a good time. It’s always a few people that can ruin it for everybody else.”

“I want everybody to coexist here,” said Ranger Larry Chavez, 40, a 12-year veteran. “Our bottom line is we just don’t want anybody to get hurt. If people just mellow out, everything will be fine.”

Chavez himself is mellow and professionally calm, despite a habit of talking so fast that one thought often seems dangerously close to tripping over the next.

Answering complaints about a noisy family argument in Campground J on a recent Saturday evening, Chavez interviewed a Bakersfield man and his 12-year-old son there, then rattled off the details to a reporter.

“This is fairly typical; we see this all the time; it’s a possible family disturbance,” Chavez said, words flying from his lips in a staccato stream.

“We had people complaining from the next campsite over. I thought we might have to call the sheriff because, to hear this fellow explain it, the woman’s been drinking,” he said. “She’s got a little girl with her, and she’s over the other side of the campground, so I’m really gonna emphasize to her that we can’t have her drinking and driving around. It’s not safe for the other campers, and it’s certainly not safe for her and the little girl.”

With that, Chavez cruised off down the twisting park roads in his white Water District pickup. He found the woman sitting a mile away in a lemon-yellow Camaro with her ginger-haired 2-year-old daughter.

Blocking her exit with his truck, Chavez explained the complainant’s story and asked for her keys.

“I don’t know what he’s talking about,” she slurred in a croaking voice, her eyes red. “Don’t worry about me, I’m fine.”

“You’re fine walking, but you’re not fine driving,” Chavez said. “I can’t have you driving around the campground like this.”

As the sunset bled a magenta mist into the clouds rimming East Casitas Pass, the woman gave in, promising to stay put. But after dark, Chavez called a Ventura County sheriff’s deputy, who ordered the woman out of her car and ferried her and the child back to their campsite.

About the same time, a frog hunt was getting under way over in Campground C.

Yellow cones of light poked through the woods, followed by flashlights in the hands of the Gardena Buddhist Church Boy Scout Troop 683.

It was the first camp-out that the troop of Japanese-American boys had ever taken to Casitas.

Buoyant and boisterous at first, the red-jacketed Scouts soon hushed as their flashlights swept a rocky stream bed where frogs’ peeping calls pierced the dark.

Jeff Nisha nabbed a leopard frog, cupping it in closed hands until his troop mates surrounded him.

He opened his hands to show them the inch-long amphibian, which sat pinned in the glare of half a dozen flashlights, its throat pulsing for a moment before it leaped back to the water.

“Oh, dude, cool ,” breathed one Scout, then everyone resumed hunting among the stones.

“It’s cool, ‘cause we’ve never really done it before,” Jeff said of the camp-out, his intent eyes picking out spindly bugs that skated on the stream’s surface.

“Eeeew, dude,” said another Scout, whose flashlight revealed a dark blob scrambling among the mossy rocks, a diving beetle.

“We’ve never been next to a lake with animals in it,” said Russell Hirotsu, 13. “It’s kinda neat to go on camp-outs.”

“It’s just a good thing to be a Scout,” said Brent Aoki, 12. “You have a good chance of getting into college, and it helps with your education.”

Meanwhile, the Serbin-Diaz-Garcia-Aguas family blowout wailed on at Campground H.

Members of the families from Pico Rivera and Los Angeles had congregated here for their annual camp-out. This year’s was larger than ever.

“We were just going to invite two families,” said a smiling Christina Aguas, 20, wrapped in her boyfriend’s arms and swaying to the music. “But each family invited other families, and they invited others, and word got around.”

Her cousin, Victoria Aguas, 20, explained their love of Lake Casitas.

“It’s big, and it’s very nice, and they let you do whatever you want,” she said. “Well, not everything .”

Moments later, Ranger Chavez showed up and proved her right. It was 10:17 p.m., time to enforce the park’s 10 p.m.-to-7 a.m. quiet period.

As he waded into the dancing throng, someone silenced the tape deck’s tinny racket.

“I know you guys are having a good time, but with this big a group, the noise really carries,” Chavez said. “I’m not gonna allow you to continue. You can stay up, but you can’t play the music and you can’t have this noise. See all these people around you?”

His thick arm swung in an arc, indicating nearly a dozen campsites that encircled the family’s site like a natural amphitheater.

“They can hear you.”

With apologies, the families quieted their partying for the rest of the night.

“I think it’s OK,” Victoria Aguas said of the party’s early demise. “We have to respect the other people.”

“We would like it to go on, but there are a lot of people close to us,” admitted her cousin, Christina. “It’s not only us.”

The next morning a male neighbor groused, “I didn’t mind it for a short time, but it was going on and on.”

“It was just the music,” said the man, identifying himself only as Mark, 46, a Los Angeles software engineer. The party put a dent in the otherwise pleasant stay he and his wife and two children were having at Casitas, he said.

“I didn’t like the music. It wasn’t the kind of music I prefer. I like American music,” he said.

“The area is quite nice,” but the campsites are just too close together, he said.

That is a common complaint, park staff said.

Even in some of the newer, more sparsely arranged campgrounds such as Campground O, adjoining campsites are no wider than two-car driveways and barely three times as long.

Noise travels freely.

Besides the normal sounds of camping, motorboats drone across the lake soon after dawn, and model enthusiasts’ radio-controlled airplanes begin whining over a tiny airstrip at the campgrounds’ western end by 8 a.m.

At night, rangers often answer noise complaints about spousal spats, booming stereos and the howls of drunken campers.

“A tent don’t compare to drywall,” muttered camper Alex Reyna, 33, of Simi Valley.

He spent one night last weekend listening to a hard-drinking party from Oxnard in a neighboring campsite--and the previous night trying to sleep through a high school graduation keg party a few yards away.

At 7 a.m. last Sunday, a few hours short of a good night’s sleep, Reyna blearily tied leaders onto his fishing tackle to prepare for a day on the lake.

“I heard a camper tell them to pipe down, but I knocked out about 12:30, and they were still at it,” he said of the graduates. “They turned off the music, but they were talking and giggling and stuff like that.”

“It’s like sleeping with a bunch of homeless people. Everybody’s just out here right next to each other,” growled Jason Segura, 20, a Ventura carpet installer.

“When you’re going camping, you want to be out roughing it,” said his camping partner, Kevin Sewell, a 22-year-old Ventura data-entry operator. “But not in your neighbor’s yard.”

Campers could soon have more room to spread out if park staff executes plans to build a campground on Main Island in the lake’s center, accessible only by boat, Ranger Doan said.

But Doan said campers shouldn’t expect pure peace and quiet at Casitas.

“There’s a big difference between being here and hiking back 50 miles into the Sierras and having your own wilderness campground,” said Doan, 32, now in his 18th year at the lake. “This is more of an urban campground.”

At Campground O, aerospace worker Steve Jimenez, 24, and his buddies tried to decide what to do with the rest of their Sunday morning. They came to Casitas the night before after the Wheeler Gorge campground staff threw them out for making too much noise.

Here, a few neighboring campers griped, but no one had called the rangers as the group joked and talked into the early morning hours, then crashed.

“You don’t need no shower, you don’t need no phone, you don’t need no gussying up,” said Jimenez, sprawled in a folding chair as the cool, post-dawn light revealed a campsite littered with 20-ounce King Cobra Malt Liquor cans and a collapsed tent.

“Our motto is, ‘It’s just camping--don’t worry about it.’ ”

FYI

Campsites at Lake Casitas, including parking for one car, cost $10 per night, with a maximum of six people per site. There is a $6 fee for each additional vehicle, with a maximum of three vehicles per site. A site with power and water hookups costs $14 per night in the off-season, and $16 per night in the summer. Group campsites cost $25 per night, plus $10 per car. For day-trippers, entrance costs $3 per motor vehicle, $3.50 per boat and $10 per bus. Daytime visitors must pay $1 for each pet they bring, and the fee is $1.50 each per day for campers’ pets. For information call 649-2233.

Campgrounds at Lake Casitas

Lake Casitas Recreation Area has 455 campsites for motorists, hikers and bicyclists, plus overflow campgrounds outside the main entrance for summer weekends when visitors exceed the park’s capacity. The park has a policy of never turning away campers.