Check out the website for the proposed Crosswater Yacht Club.  This mammoth marina, if approved, will be on Lake Travis in Graveyard Point.  To access it, people will have to drive through Lakeway and that has a lot of people fired up. 

The proposal says that the marina will occupy about 217,401 of water survace area, which is about 5 acres.  If you to the Travis County Tax Appraisal District you will see that the marina address, 1505 Hurst Creek, you will see a land area of that parcel listed as over 59 acres.  If you look on the website and click on the Plans button you will see a graphic of what looks like the surface area of Lake Travis that the marina will control. Getting back to the 59 acres, I don't know if the land area above and below the water is the full 59 acres, but what if it is?

History has shown that Lake Travis can drop to a very low level.  So all of this brings questions to my mind. What is the slope like under the surface area of Lake Travis that the marina will control?   Lakefront land on Lake Travis is generally owned to the bottom of what was the river bed.  The graphic shows the area of control the marina has going what looks like about 2/3 across the lake.  This makes me think that the slope is relatively gentle out to that point.

Lake Travis has recently been as low as around 642 feet above mean sea level.  The full level is 681 feet.  At 642 the lake was almost half empty and is sure showed.  Marinas had to float their docks way out into the lake and some had to take them to deep water across the lake. The lowest Lake Travis has been is 614 feet, which gets to my point...

How far out might the docks on this marina go if (really when) the lake gets extremely low again? In theory, it looks like they can go more than half way across the lake.  Boat traffic on this part of Lake Travis is huge, especially on weekends and holidays.  Does anyone besides me see a huge safety issue here with boat traffic potentially being forced into an area that may be quite narrow?  If you look at a map, the width of Lake Travis where the marina will control so much surface area of Lake Travis looks to be about 2000 feet.  When the lake gets low, just how far out will the marina be allowed to move and how narrow with the "gauntlet" be?

People in Lakeway are against the marina for some good reasons:  high traffic through Lakeway in areas with a lot of kids.  People who have been boating and drinking driving through the neighborhood.  Property values on Hurst Creek may gow down as a result.  However, the area in which this marina may be built isn't in Lakeway and the city has no control.

My personal thought about killing this marina has more to do with safety than Lakeway, although I appreciate and support the position of Lakeway residents opposing the marina.  There is already a huge amount of boat traffic on Lake Travis and that will only increase. 

I'm sure there is more to the story than this, but these are my thoughts right now.