Take a Lake Mead tour, by jumping onto a jet ski for an aquatic adventure

Melissa Schorr

Saturday, May 2, 1998 | 4:25 a.m.

The lake was so calm, even Walden would have approved.

Suddenly, in the distance, the sweet serenity was broken as the buzzing sound of angry hornets filled the air.

A swarm of yellow jackets, lined up in chorus line formation, headed toward the shore.

A group of killer bees, making its way across the border? No, just a killer new way to tour Lake Mead.

Jet Ski Tours, a local company subcontracting from Lake Mead Cruises, is offering a new option for tourists this season: A historical tour and a day of jet skiing rolled into one.

"We're the first one to do this in a national park," tour guide and co-owner Dan Moran brags.

He and his two partners, Randy Stockdale and his mother, Catherine Stockdale -- who also rent jet skis from their Henderson shop, Get It Wet -- have invested $100,000 in a fleet of 25 bright yellow Bombardier Sea-Doos ("the Cadillac of jet skis," they say), hoping to lure tourists and locals to this one-of-a-kind aquatic adventure.

The new venture came about when Moran and the Stockdales lost their home base, renting jet skis at Calville Bay. The three approached Meg Fair, who, with her husband, Rod, holds the concession to run all boat tours on Lake Mead.

The Fairs, who debuted the Desert Princess paddleboat seven years ago, were looking for ways to expand. Together, they came up with the idea for jet ski tours, adapted from the snowmobile tours their company runs at Lake Tahoe.

This is not the only new offering in store from Lake Mead Cruises.

Other additions in the works include the "Outrageous Tour" in June -- a 40-passenger jet boat offering five-hour tour traveling to the edge of Grand Canyon, peeking inside and jetting back to Las Vegas for about $250, as well as a new 53-foot upscale yacht, called Rendezvous, available for chartering.

They have also added live entertainment on the boat landing on Sunday afternoons, from 2 to 9 p.m., with James Quill Smith of Three Dog Night playing; and a full-service bar, which the Fairs salvaged from the ship they were married on and installed on the three-year-old dock.

"Destination companies are always looking for a new venue to take clients," Meg Fair says, explaining the need for expansion. "As word gets out, I think it will be gobbled up."

Maybe even before word gets out: Stockdale says she doesn't know how, but word somehow spread on a travel newswire, and suddenly they were bombarded with calls.

"All of a sudden, we started getting calls from Baltimore, Florida, even Australia," she says. "We don't know who did it. It was fantastic."

The tour is currently scheduled once a day, but the operators hope to bump that up to five a day if the response is strong -- and as long as El Nino doesn't return.

Water rules

With insurance rates running more than $10,000 a year, the tour understandably emphasizes safety: The sit-down skis don't flip as easily as the standing version, and the tour keeps would-be-hotdoggers reigned in on a 35-mile-per-hour limit.

"It's kind of a soft adventure," Moran admits. "This is like a ride in an amusement park. It's real hands-on. One thing I do have to instill is, 'do not ride directly behind somebody -- there are no brakes on a boat.' "

While there have been concerns raised about the recklessness of some jet skiers, compounded by the low minimum age required to operate a jet ski (12 years old in Nevada), Karen Whitney, public information officer for the National Parks Service, says they don't anticipate any problems with the added traffic of Jet Ski Tours because of its controlled nature.

"If it did interfere with the general public's use or safety, we would limit it, but I don't expect that to occur," she says. "This is a guided tour. They will get safety information and be shown how to operate the craft. It's just like a horseback ride, but on a watercraft.

"We have so many new people in the area," Whitney adds. "I think it would be a great way to get acquainted with Lake Mead -- and how to operate a personal watercraft."

Fair agrees: "A tour is a neat way to be able to educate them. You're not just turning them loose with a piece of heavy equipment when they've never driven a boat or know the rules of the road on the water.

"(The jet skis) are guided, they're controlled, and they're easy to operate," she says. "You can get on them and not even get wet, if it's a calm day."

Making waves

On a recent weekday, the employees of Fisher-Rosemount, an industrial instrumentation firm from Minneapolis, in town for a sales meeting, were given a choice: They could play golf at the Paiute Golf Resort, take a tour of Hoover Dam or the desert, hang around by the pool at Caesars Palace or go jet skiing on Lake Mead.

For 14 of them, the choice was simple.

"I saw this (and) I thought this might be an interesting option for this group," Rick Gold explained. The vice president of sales at Maritz Travel Company in St. Louis planned this activiy for the group, and was checking out the new programs for future bookings.

After a brief safety lesson, the group -- including four who had never tried jet skiing before -- was laced up into their corset-like life jackets, placed aboard the jet skis and had their photos snapped for posterity.

The two-hour tour included meandering around the coves, a foray into Black Canyon to look at the dam from the northern side, and an afternoon swim, while Moran shouted out his historical spiel, as provided by the National Parks Service: The height of the dam, how to spot big horn sheep, and significant rock formations around the lake.

On this tour -- one of the first given -- there were still a few kinks to work out: One of the new, untested Sea-Doos kept stalling out, while Moran shouted through a megaphone and gave instructions via police siren until the owners could install some kind of radio transmitters.

But Gold was impressed enough to recommend it to his other clients. "Nobody fell off -- I thought for sure somebody would," he says. "I've been to Lake Mead before -- but I've never seen the lake like this."

For Meg Fair, that reaction is to be expected. A tour by water, she says, is not merely the best way to see the lake -- it is the only way.