Ladies of the Lake

This year, five have drowned at the lake. Three died in the same accidental drowning while swimming from the shore, one man drowned when he jumped into the water in a swimming area and panicked and the fifth victim was in the party cove.

Lewisville Lake is crowded and has been the site of some bad accidents, but no matter what officials say, the truth is that the lake isn't all that dangerous compared with other lakes.

National and local statistics show that most of the lake's drowning victims were swimmers at the shore who sometimes were drunk, sometimes careless and sometimes just unfortunate.

"Based on accident report data submitted by Texas to the U.S. Coast Guard...Lake Lewisville doesn't appear to have a high number of reported accidents," says Bruce Schmidt, a statistician with the Coast Guard in Washington, D.C.

Schmidt, who extracted lake accident reports from national data, says Lewisville Lake seems comparable to other lakes as far as accidents go, and that if any Texas lake could be considered "dangerous," it might be Lake Travis, where the numbers of accidents show inexplicable increases and decreases. But, he says, it's not the body of water that's dangerous; it's the behavior of lake users.

The combination of water, smothering heat, alcohol-fueled energy and impaired judgment has worried law enforcement since the party cove became a regular attraction during the past decade or so, says Turner, the game warden who patrols the cove.

On June 7, Nick Morris, a promising 17-year-old high school graduate on his way to a full-ride football scholarship at Southeastern Oklahoma State University, drowned in the cove. He was found floating with his face underwater, though police aren't certain what happened. Toxicology tests on the boy were not yet available, and family members would not talk about it.

After the drowning, authorities said they planned to step up patrols in the party cove. Douglass says the hundreds of boaters who usually can be found at the cove and their "over-21 fun" make them an easy target when something on the lake goes wrong. He insists that the lake isn't all that dangerous, and neither is the party cove.

"I think the fact that we've been doing it for quite a few years without any real major incidents is pretty good evidence of that," he says. "The people that are out there, when you talk to them, they are very concerned about safety."

For instance, last month a woman was allegedly sexually assaulted at the cove. At first, from the story that was circulating, it sounded as if the woman had been dragged into a boat and raped. The true story, Douglass says, isn't great, but the incident can't be blamed on the party cove. He says the woman was sexually assaulted by someone unknown to party cove regulars while she was riding on a jet ski with him. Douglass says it also happened far away from the cove.

As the cove's unofficial photographer and engineer of the Wet Rat Web site, Douglass happened to have taken a picture of the jet ski operator whom police were trying to find after the assault, and he gave it to police. Most of the people in the cove know each other, even if only by first name, and they look out for one another, he says. They don't welcome troublemakers, and they band together to oust them if they show up.

Although public officials have said they want to settle down the partying in the cove, it doesn't seem like they could do much about it.

At the Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri, a more than 2-decades-old party cove is a regular weekend destination. As described by Missouri officials and depicted in an R-rated Web site, the scene in Missouri is pretty similar to Lewisville's but on a much larger scale. During the Fourth of July weekend, the Lake of the Ozarks attracted as many people as a rock concert, says Nick Humphrey, a corporal with the Missouri State Water Patrol who has worked the Lake of the Ozarks party cove since 1999.

"We're estimating about 2,000 boats in there, so you figure an average of five people per boat; you are probably looking at 10,000 people in there," he says. "Lots of nudity, lots of sex acts in public. A lot of drug use. Tons and tons of intoxicated boat operators...Alcohol and drugs and like a big concert--there's not enough officers to really get in there. We kind of patrol the edges of it...We just don't have the personnel, the manpower to get in there and work it."

Like at Lewisville Lake, Missouri authorities say they mostly become concerned with drunken boating, illegal drug use and public sex acts affiliated with the party cove. Incredibly, Humphrey says, while injuries are pretty common at the Lake of the Ozarks, drownings are rare.

"It's really, truly amazing, but we don't have that many drownings in the party cove, and I don't know how. You see guys sitting on the back of boats so drunk that they are just falling-over drunk, and people pass out in boats," he says. "We've had one drowning in there this year. I don't think we're averaging even one drowning in the party cove per year."