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| Jacobs Creek Park, Canyon Lake - Canyon Lake, TX USA
Wind Conditions: Fair Water Conditions: Excellent Launch facilities: Excellent Beach conditions: Excellent Traffic conditions: Excellent Safety: Good Charges: None yet, hopefully soon About the place: Jacobs Creek Park is off of state route 306 between IH 35 and IH37 north of San Antonio. There's about half a dozen ways to get there and they all take an hour from San Antonio. Jacobs Creek has been the unofficial cat launch beach for Hobie fleet 128 since the early 1980s. The Army Corps of Engineers maintains the lake shoreline and made a special effort to set up Jacobs Creek as a place to launch catamarans. They brought in tons of sand and pea gravel, graded it, and put up signs indicating that no power boats were to launch there. Unfortunately it is the most perfect people beach on the lake, too, AND it is the only park on the lake with no entry fee. As you might guess, there is usually a crowd of people who cannot afford other forms of wet entertainment at Jacobs Creek. We expect that to change this year as the Army has plans to finally make Jacobs Creek a fee park. Sailing at Canyon Lake is wonderful! The water is so clear that NASA used to give the astronauts SCUBA training there. The wind prevails from the SE so if you stay away from the SE canyon walls, you're okay. Still it is surrounded by hills and the wind is not like you'd expect at ocean (coast, beach, shore - depending on where you live). Back in the heyday we used to get 150 boats at regattas at Jacobs Creek. All the boats could pull up on the beach on the point and the entire crowd was automatically circled for fun. Almost everyone could camp next to their boats on the water. Canyon Lake is 11 miles long and 5 miles wide at the widest. It's built in a canyon so it looks like a Chinese Dragon with fingers (sorry Frank) extending everywhere. There's lots of good wind and lots of places you don't want to go, but you learn fast. Underwater hazards are minimal and well marked. Jet skiers are becoming more numerous BUT THE ARMY KEEPS THEM AWAY FROM JACOBS CREEK and tickets the hell out of them. If you have a H-16 or longer you need registration numbers on your boat (most of you are probably puzzled but in Texas you didn't used to have to register a boat unless it had a motor or was over a certain length. That length is now 16 feet). Come visit us at Jacobs Creek. Submitted by: David Hall <dchall@texas.net> San Antonio, TX USA - Friday, October 11, 1996 at 04:47:07 (PDT) |