Quote:
Originally Posted by MikeWaters
so to do it proper you have to have a houseboat and a ski boat?
Nice.
I'm guessing there are lots of kids in Utah who don't get to live on a houseboat for a week, water skiing everyday.
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This is correct. The houseboat is literally your portable tent. It is not meant to be your main mode of transport on the lake. Even for cruising it is a bad option because it burns through so much gas. It can cost $500-1000 to fill up a houseboat these days, so you are not going to fire it up to go see Rainbow Bridge.
The standard approach is to use the houseboat as your base. Your houseboat leaves from one of the main marinas at Powell (Wahweap in AZ side, Bullfrong on UT side). You also usually launch a ski boat. Some of the fun is being in the ski boat.....you can leave beforehand and explore for awhile to find a nice beach where you want to land your houseboat. Or you can just ask and they will often tell you where to beach it. Once the houseboat and ski boat take off and beach, you camp there for the week (or however long). You use the ski boat to get around, ski, go into the marina for supplies, explore caves, cliff jump, etc. The houseboat almost never moves.
It is not uncommon to see a houseboat towing several wave-runners behind it (or even ski boats) as it lumbers out of the marina towards its beach.
As Sizzle pointed out, it is amazingly fun.
It is quite expensive, though, so it is not uncommon for families to pool their resources and go in on the rentals. Also, the most fun Powell trips I have had always involved larger groups, anyway. Like Sizz said, everyone sleeps up top on the deck. If you do it right, you bring your stereo with home speakers, video games, movies, a full BBQ, etc...
I thought you were kidding about the houseboat pulling a skier, so apologies if you really did not know. If you are to ever go houseboating, you would immediately see the humor in the question, though. It would be like trying to enter the Indy 500 driving a tractor.