Those Crazy Clarks: The Beach House at Clear Lake, California

My parents like to rent a beach house in Lake County, California for the family reunion. This is the first time Blake and I and the kids stayed at the beach house and played on the water. This year we stayed in Nice on Clear Lake. It is called Clear Lake but it was anything but clear. It was very grassy on the shore and far out. My brother, Jeremy had his jet skis there. One of them was a stand up jet ski(whatever you call that) and we weren't coordinated enough to get it to work so my parents rented another jet ski. Thank goodness they rented one...we'll get to that later. We kept having to stop and remove grass from the jet skis every few minutes and of course it was worse when you went slow. And with kids you go slow. We stopped a lot. After we left, they found a place to ride that was free from grass.

You can see the walk way out to the deck and dock where we put the jet skis in. Each house had one. That walk way is actually the neighbor's. We stayed in the house on the far left. The lake was low. Most of the wooden posts of the walk way are usually under water. They were two story houses fully furnished with everything but food. We stayed in bedrooms on the 2nd floor that had sliding glass doors onto the patio surrounded by metal railing with gaps between the rails that weren't up to code. The first thing Colton did when he got up in the morning was go out the door and onto the patio and through the railing. He had one foot on the eves of roof below ready to climb down where I was standing on first floor patio. He thought he found a short cut. I screamed for Blake to go get him and told him to not move. Blake got him and he was fine.

This is taken from the the other side of the deck out on the lake above the dock with Clear Lake in back ground.

This was the ramp down to the dock where we loaded the jet skis. It was initially at a 45 degree angle. Blake had to carefully back the kids down the ramp one at a time. Under the ramp and the open railings was deep lake water. We joked about sending the kids down the ramp on their bums like a slide but they'd probably veer right our left and end up in the lake. I was too scared to go down it until we figured out how to raise the dock so the ramp wasn't so steep.

Colton and Megan with my sister Katy and Joey. Getting ready to ride.

Not much jet skiing the first day for the kids until we rented a jet ski and fixed the ramp so they spent a lot of fun time in the not so hot, hot tub. It was actually perfect temp for swimming.

We all had so much fun on the jet skis. We just wished we could of had more time on them. I guess I am speaking for myself. The kids did have a lot of fun too. Just a scarey incident made them happy to get out of the water. We'll get to that.

That was one fast jet ski.

Colton with Papa Dave. Easy does it. Colton loved the ride.

Jayce and Blake on the grassy lake.

Megan and Blake. Megan kept saying to go faster. She was riding with me and I accidentally punched it and almost threw us both off. Had to catch our breath and get our hearts out of our throats before we started again.

Papa and cousin Joey

Steph and Colton, Blake and Jayce and...are those Dave's fingers on that stand up jet ski? Dave was determined to ride that stand up jet ski.

He's moving but not up. After several days of practice, he was able to ride the thing.

Papa Dave taking Megan and Jayce for a ride. He let Megan drive. She thought that was fun but soon decided just to steer and let Dave control the gas. They seemed to be having fun. They got pretty far out but not any further than the rest of us on any of our rides. It was just shocking to watch them riding along, turn around to help Blake do something then turn back around and discover that the jet ski they are on was tipped over and I couldn't see the kids or Dave. They were so far out that I had to ask Blake if I was seeing what I thought I was. My sister Katy was off on the other jet ski so when she came back for grass removal we sent her to rescue Dave and the kids. The jet ski the kids were on wouldn't start and had to be towed back to shore. What would we have done if my parents hadn't rented that extra jet ski? There was no way to swim out to help. I guess I could have blown up an air raft I had in the car and paddled out. But that would have taken forever. I guess we would have hoped a neighbor was home and asked for help. Okay, lesson learned...life jackets really do save lives!