Showboat Beach

For years, the old Showboat Theater floated along Portage Bay, in the midst of the oceanography and fisheries buildings, but by the 1990s, I guess they were afraid it would sink - or maybe it actually had sunk?

The old showboat went away and it was replaced by a small park and a beach, just down the hill from the South Campus Center. It's a nice place for students to hang out on nice sunny days - so it was empty on this visit.

AERIAL VIEW

I took advantage of a break at the Landslide Forum (Seattle Times article) to wander down with my coffee to see how the beach was doing. It's doing okay. I suppose it's a pretty confusing place to be a beach - a little bit of wind wave action from the south and a constant stream of boat wakes - and then add to that the strange plumbing of the Lake Washington system, which maintains higher water levels in the summer and lower ones in the winter (thus the wider beach in this photo).