Ladies of the Lake

The haven that the Wet Rat became paid off for Douglass in a big way last summer when Hall came aboard to escape an obnoxious man in the water who was offering the women shoulder massages. Hall, who had been at the lake with a friend of one of Douglass' friends, said that once aboard the Wet Rat, she saw that Douglass needed help with a badly sunburned head.

"The rest is history," says the 40-year-old Hall, who will marry Douglass on August 9 aboard the Lake Dallas Palace. Hall, who plans to wear a white bikini with a lace overdress, says she's nervous about the wedding because she, her mother (for whom she is a caregiver) and her 16-year-old daughter will all move in with Douglass.

The party cove group that hangs out with Douglass and regularly hops into and out of the Wet Rat were brought together by the lake, but their friendships have spilled out into their regular lives, they say. Although many seem to know each other by just their first names, they frequently get together outside of the party cove, Hall says.

"It's a big cultural melting pot out here," says cove regular Troy Maton, 28, who runs a media Web site for auto companies. "It doesn't matter what your job is; you all just hang out together. You look around, and someone could make 30K or 500K. You could hang with the VP of a company and be the mailroom guy from another."

And all of them could find themselves immortalized on Douglass' Wet Rat Web site, where party cove photographs from many previous weekends are posted and where there is access to links and information about lake activities. The combination of his hospitality, the Web site (www.wetrat.com) and maybe his age helped establish Douglass as the go-to guy. Most of the swimmers and boaters who drift by seem to know him. Even lake law enforcement is well acquainted with him.

"He's not really party central, but there's just always a lot of people around him and by him," says Jim Turner, a state game warden who patrols the lake. "He does a lot of helpful stuff for us."

In the air-conditioned cabin of the Wet Rat, in a row of binders on a shelf, are the pictures he's taken of naked or partially naked women at the party cove, and there are lots of them. You have to be invited to look at the pictures, and they don't leave the cabin, he says.

"That's where they'll stay," Douglass says. "None of those pictures has ever been put on our Web site."

Of course, who needs pictures when so much flesh is there for the ogling in the...well... flesh? A woman in a pink cowboy hat wearing a piece of string for a bikini bottom floats by facedown on an air mattress, then reveals her breasts to some eager men on a nearby boat. A buxom woman on a jet ski driven by a man pulls open her life vest, exposing her breasts to the row of boats and all of the swimmers. To the uninitiated, all of the skin is really more comic than erotic.

Which may not be exactly what the jet-ski flasher, Jay Joy, would want to hear, though when the Dallas Observer returned to the cove on another weekend, the uninhibited Joy was still bare, soaking in the sun with her more chastely dressed husband of 1 1/2 years, Rob.

"I'm from the beach, and I felt very landlocked in North Dallas," she says. "After you buy a house that backs up to a lake, you gotta buy a boat and Sea-Doos and all that stuff." She wears aqua gingham bikini bottoms and no top and has long, sun-bleached blond hair and sunglasses with Texas-shaped lenses.

The Joys move below deck on the Wet Rat to look at some photos. Rob says more specifically, "I'm going down to see her photos."

Photos, always more photos, and not the surreptitious, hidden-camera kind, either.

"I have to take my top off," says 32-year-old Terri (who didn't give her last name). Her husband, Scott, 38, wants to take a photo of Terri's and Jay's augmented breasts.

"These are not quite a year old," Scott says as he grabs Terri's breasts. "Friends told us about the Wet Rat Web site, and here we are. We just love to come and hang out," he adds without a hint of irony.

"I don't just sit out here without my top," Terri says. "There are other girls that do. Later in the day the tops come off...After a few drinks, it gets easier. You're less inhibited."

Everybody, including Douglass, says the cove is adult entertainment, and that's what newcomers should expect.

"It's just not a place for kids," Wet Rat says.

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In 1993, Denton County officials formed a Lewisville Lake safety panel to "address Lewisville Lake's reputation as the country's most dangerous lake," according to an article in The Dallas Morning News. Two years later, a boat literally ripped off a young Carrollton woman's face as she sat in another boat in a marina no-wake zone, and the lake's reputation as a dangerous place seemed to stick with the media and public.