I’ve often thought about keeping Splendido moored on a buoy all year ’round at Lake Tahoe, but photos like this, courtesy of my friends at BiggestLittleCity.org, remind me that placid Lake Tahoe can get pretty hairball when a cold front moves through. Now, I’m no surfing expert (I did take lessons some years ago in Leucadia, California, but it was pretty mellow (and warm), at least compared to Lake Tahoe standards), but these swells look to me to be in the five-foot range. What caused these rollers? A nice extended period of blasting winds, where the forecast said gusts would reach 100 mph over the ridge tops and where locals clocked the winds at 70 mph in the open areas, such as across the lake. On a related note, we had a pretty significant dry spell at Tahoe up until about a week ago, when we got an “atmospheric river” coming out of the tropics that dumped about 5.5″ inches of rain into the lake. The National Weather Service said that equates to something like 17.2 billion gallons of water addded to the lake, which I can barely comprehend, but it makes me happy. Hopefully we’ll get several more storms to build up the snowpack and get the lake back to “normal” levels.

Fair winds and smooth sailing. DB