Word: houseboats
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Just as we were setting out on the family vacation, the reality of what I'd done began to hit me. Six months earlier, in a burst of frustration over a long winter in New Jersey, I'd booked a houseboat on a lake somewhere in the Arizona wilderness. My cousin had taken a similar vacation and raved about it. Up to then, my nautical experience consisted of rowing a 12-ft. boat in New York City's Central Park. Awaiting us in Arizona, though, was not a modest little craft. Nope, I'd be piloting...
Vacationing by houseboat was largely unheard of 30 years ago. But in the past decade, houseboat rentals have surged to the point where reservations are often booked a year in advance. At our destination of Lake Powell--a serpentine waterway straddling Arizona and Utah--fewer than two dozen houseboats were available for rent 30 years ago; today there are 400. One reason for their popularity is that houseboating offers a novel way to see some of the most spectacular scenery in the country. Plus, houseboats offer family and friends an opportunity to be under way while under one roof...
...Roto-Root the river all the way from St. Louis to Dubuque. It's an all consuming mission, worthy of an aquatic Don Quixote, and Pregracke's Mississippi River Beautification and Restoration Project has been at it for almost four years. After waking each morning on the crowded houseboat that is home to himself, five assistants and three dogs, he ventures out among the sloughs and sandbars to battle a rising tide of trash and fill the small flotilla of rusting barges that he pushes upstream with the help of passing tugboats, a clutch of corporate sponsors and sheer willpower...
...boyish zeal, Pregracke began to enlarge upon his ambitions. He hunted up a couple of outboard motors, the barges, two aluminum runabouts and an Army-surplus bridge-building boat, which he equipped with a John Deere combine cab to make a sort of tugboat. He raised a sinking houseboat, made it seaworthy, assembled an eager young crew and hit the river--vowing to spend his summers on the water until the job was done...
...idealism though, he's not naive. He knows the value of modern public relations. He decorates his barges with the logos of sponsors, from Cargill to O'Douls, and maintains a cutting-edge website, www.cleanrivers.com From his sleeping bag on the houseboat, he uses a pair of cell phones to drum up funds and give interviews to journalists. He's made some influential friends as well, including Robert Kennedy Jr., whose own conservation group, Riverkeeper, Pregracke admires and draws inspiration from...