All the comforts of home, and then some

A rap remake of a classic ‘70s ballad is booming from the upper-deck speakers of David Young’s 78-foot houseboat when he invites me aboard.

The sun is baking the harbor at Lake Mead’s Callville Bay, but it’s cool inside Young’s air-conditioned boat. As he nurses a beer, the Las Vegas towing company operator walks me through his shag-carpeted living room, past the satellite TV and DVD player. Down the hall are three bedrooms, two bathrooms and a full-service kitchen.

“If you want to see a really nice boat, you should check out that one,” he says, waving his beer can toward the floating mansion in the next slip.

So he takes me onto his neighbor’s houseboat to see its centralized carpet vacuuming system, the automated water slide, the four built-in ice makers and the water filtration system that can convert murky lake water into drinking water.

As lavish as that boat is, Young says, it’s not as luxurious as “Joe’s boat” a few slips away.

I visited Lake Mead on a hot June weekend to gauge the state of modern houseboating. My new beer-swilling pal summarized it in one succinct sentence: “We don’t rough it.”

For every super-accessorized houseboat I visited, there was another bigger, more expensive version packed from bow to stern with more extravagant amenities. I even spotted exercise equipment atop one.

Houseboats gradually evolved from floating shanties in the early 1800s to quaint cruiser cabins with cramped kitchenettes in the 1960s and ‘70s. But in the past decade, they have morphed into water-treading castles, containing the kind of creature comforts found in many Beverly Hills day spas.

Houseboat vendors and manufacturers attribute the super-sizing trend to the development of quieter, more efficient generators in the 1980s and the shift toward shared ownership in the 1990s, among other changes. The newer generators made adding onboard appliances, such as air conditioners, televisions and microwave ovens, more practical. And by dividing the cost of a houseboat among 15 to 20 investors, bigger houseboats became more affordable.

Some say the bigger-is-better trend is driven by ego and the need to outdo the next guy. It’s the same reason we have hill-hugging McMansions, tank-size SUVs and private jets equipped with gourmet kitchens and massage tables.

“Everywhere you look, everything is getting nicer,” says John Sturgill, chief executive of Fantasy Yachts by Botewerks, a Kentucky-based manufacturer of some of the country’s most luxurious houseboats. “Your TVs, your RVs, your boats. We were just following the market trend that is happening to everything else.”

Whatever the reason, the size of today’s houseboats border on the ridiculous. Consider:

* The Titan, a 65-foot, two-story behemoth that sleeps 22 and comes with a spiral-tube water slide, a fireplace, hot tub for eight and a home theater system. Rent it at Lake Shasta for about $5,200 a weekend.

* The Millennium, a 70-foot vessel with four queen-size beds, a six-person hot tub, central air and heating, a wet bar and a 36-inch flat-screen TV. Take it for a spin on Lake Mead for about $4,400 for a weekend.

* The Odyssey, a 75-foot ship with six “staterooms,” a gas fireplace, a swim slide, TV screens and a kitchen with a dishwasher, a wine cooler and a trash compactor. About $10,500 gets you seven days on this boat in Lake Powell.

Sturgill’s company took luxury houseboats to new heights in 2001 when it built a 130-foot custom houseboat called Imagination. This leviathan, with a price tag of about $1 million, has 2,900 square feet of living space. That’s bigger than the average Southern California home. On top of that, it comes with a helipad on the upper deck.

Despite talk about a depressed economy, sales of colossal houseboats remain strong: The average houseboat sold for $720,000 in 2005, according to the National Marine Manufacturers Assn. in Chicago.

Because of the popularity of bigger houseboats, Shasta-Trinity National Recreation Area officials recently increased the maximum boat length on Lake Shasta from 56 feet to 65 feet to accommodate the Titan. The houseboat made its debut in May and already has been reserved throughout this summer.

The national park officials at Shasta-Trinity have limited the number of houseboats allowed on the lake to control pollution and crowding problems, as have the park officials at most lakes that have houseboats. As for the Titan, National Park Service spokesman Mike Odle says his agency is limiting the number of 65-foot boats to a handful while they conduct a yearlong impact study.

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Whoa, Joe

BACK at Lake Mead, the creme de la creme of houseboats is the Top Hat, the one Young calls “Joe’s boat.”

The owner of this 75-by-22-foot vessel is Joe Viviani, a Las Vegas mortgage company owner. He, his wife and dog motor up to the harbor in a rubber dinghy, and Viviani invites me to check out his $700,000 baby. We cruise to the nearby slip where his boat is docked.

Like most houseboat owners, Viviani keeps the Top Hat docked in the harbor year-round, and he sleeps on it more often than he does in his Las Vegas home.

Inside, I check out the four roomy bedrooms, the kitchen with the granite countertop, the 13-foot wrap-around leather couch, the 65-inch flat-screen TV, the GPS navigation system and the six-person Jacuzzi on the top deck.

It’s a party boat, Viviani explains. During his last bash, he had about 65 people on the top deck and still had room for 40 more downstairs. He also cooks a lot on the boat. “I’ve gained 40 pounds since I bought this,” he says, slapping his shirtless gut.

“With these boats, you can have just as much fun as you can have.”

To experience the joys of houseboating, I rent a 50-foot houseboat from Forever Resorts, the marina concessionaire at Callville Bay. For $1,895, plus the cost of gas, I get the boat for three days. It sleeps eight people so it’s more than enough boat for my wife, our 7-year-old daughter and me.

It’s a shotgun shack compared to Viviani’s vessel, but my little craft has everything we need: central air conditioning, a microwave oven, a propane stove, a refrigerator, a television with a VHS and DVD player, a stereo, a flush toilet, a shower and a water slide from the top deck.

After taking a brief onboard operating lesson, I set off on Lake Mead. After about an hour of cruising the turquoise-green water, we moor the boat in an isolated cove with a view of a rocky two-tone canyon to the south.

As the sun sets, we crank up the generator and heat up some franks and beans on the kitchen stove and watch a DVD on the boat’s color TV.

But the warm night air and the gentle sounds of the waves entice us outside. We shut down the generator, turn off the lights and lie on a blanket on the top deck, watching a luminescent moon float over a nearby outcropping called Boulder Peak. The rocks glow silver. The stars break out of the blackness, satellites crisscross the sky and flitter-winged bats chase mosquitoes across the water.

This kind of fun is just priceless.