Exploring the Splendor of Lake Powell with Up Lake Adventures

Hi. This is Ray Novak with Icom America. Our Marine addition of a radios in action. And here we are today with Bob Reed of Uplake Adventures. Good morning. Bob, give us a little bit about what Uplake adventures is and what you guys do. So up lake adventures, we are based at Lake Powell, Utah. That's in the southern spot, Southern part of Lake Pal. Of Utah, and we operate on the southern end of Lake Powell. Up Lake adventures, we call it that because we typically leave the southern end go north up to a hundred, hundred and fifty miles and explore Lake Powell. It's a beautiful location. We typically do that on Sedoos and we have clients follow us on see do's that we provide and we communicate using the icon radios throughout the day. And we do overnight camping, cruising, the slot canyons, hiking, fishing. It's just a wonderful experience. So what what level of experience does your typical, adventures need to go do something with you? Pretty much if you can walk and talk, we'll take you. We take a lot of people who've never ever driven a personal watercraft. Before. And so that's really exciting to show them not only how they operate that. But they've never been to this part of the country before. So It's a whole new experience. We do take some of real advanced riders on some more extreme wintertime, you know, riding and things like that. But most of our clients are first time drivers or riders on these machines and, doesn't take long before they feel quite confident because the machines that we use are the CD explorer pros which are, you know, twelve feet long. They're really stable. You don't get wet. They don't tip over. They got great features, breaks, and things on them reversed. And, of course, with the radios, being able to communicate, that's been probably One of our most significant things that we do to help us, teach these new people is with the communication back and forth. When you're on the water, you can be, you know, fifty feet, thirty feet from somebody and literally not hear them talking over the noise of the motor or the wind. And so to give instructions to new people, the radios are fantastic. Because we use the, the one sixty five microphone and speaker that's connected to the radio. And we actually got with CDu and they've manufactured brand new life jackets with a place for the m twenty five to go and for the microphone to go right up by the shoulder. And, this way it allows people to hear us, hear the guide, and, communicate at all times. It's been fantastic. So you said that earlier that there was, varying levels of experience that you guys take. And you mentioned something that I thought was quite interesting. You said you're in Utah, and then you said winter. What is a winter adventure like? Well, in November through March, it gets colder. When I say cold, that means for us is like eighteen degrees in the morning. And so most people stop using watercraft and they stop water activities. But because of what we do, we do a lot of wintertime fishing and and exploring. Late Powell is amazing in the winter. There's not much wind. It's glass water. There's hardly anybody ever on the lake. So it provides opportunities for us to explore these areas, you know, in, without anybody else out there. However, we do need to address appropriately We do need to have gloves and we have some gear that keeps us dry. And if we step off the machines, we do overnight camping. We did a trip last year. We one of our big events every year is our winter solstice ride on December twenty first, which is the shortest daylight of the year in North America. To celebrate our sunshine coming back the next day, we leave the southern part of the lake here Wal Week Marina at seven AM and we get on our seedoos and get everybody has their radios and we start heading north. We do, the entire length of Lake Powell, which is about Right now, this water level is about a hundred and thirty miles one direction. We turn around, come back all the way down in one day. So we do about two hundred and sixty miles. In one day on the CDs. And, we do it to beat the light coming back. It's we've done it for years. We'll do it again this year. And it's a lot of fun. That's not for everybody. It is cold, but we've taken people young as thirteen as old as eighty on this trip. And, it works great. When you talk about smooth glass water, I'm I'm guessing those that like to to go fast, you guys are full throttle these seedoos coming back? Well, we we would like to go full throttle. However, because it's such a long way we have to meter our fuel. So these machines will do about fifty five. We cruise at about forty. That way, we won't run out of fuel. But we have spurts, you know, time. We'll crank it up full throttle and When I say a mirror glass, you look at some of our videos. It's literally for miles just like you're riding on a mirror. Reflections from the canyons and it's a beautiful time of year. You also mentioned that your crew gets to go out and go fishing. What is some of the fish that you guys catch on this adventure? Oh my gosh. Wintertime, we're primarily fishing for striped bass. That's the strikers that, they're a fresh and saltwater fish. They were planted in Lake Powell in the early seventies, and they have thrived. And they're as large as forty pounds down to a couple pounds. And, the wintertime is awesome because all the fish go to the backs of the canyons where all the shad, the bait fish go because the water's more stable. The temperature of the water stable and they just school up in these big schools. We go up in there on our machines. We have, navigation and a garmin fish finder. We find a school of stripers and then it's on. We're just catching sometimes up to seventy fish per person in about five hours. So it's a lot of fun. A lot of fun. So when you guys are doing the the night camping in a win, I'm assuming that you do this in a winter as well. Do you cook what you catch? You know, sometimes we do. You know, sometimes there are, opportunities to, you know, have a short lunch or something like that. One of the things that I personally do is I'll go up the lake by myself for three days. Don't bring any food and just live off the lake, you know, catch a fish and eat it. So the there are striped bass in the lake. There are large mouth, small mouth, crappie, walleye, walleye is really good fish to eat. But the wintertime, we're primarily focusing on stripers. Most of the other fish slow down a lot and just kinda wait for the spawn to happen in March. And then when March, April, May rolls around, it's it's incredibly amazing fishing for all species. And we catch a lot of fish. So how long have you been doing this? I've been operating up lake adventures for about six years. And, we take clients from all over the world. We do we also have a large boat that we take people on. But, our primary adventure is on the CDs. And we do it that way because it's such a more personalized experience. When you're driving your own machine, we always say command your adventure. That's kind of our tagline. And that means you're in control. You can go as fast or slow as you want. You can, you know, you may wanna go explore a little canyon on the side. Somebody else may wanna just kick back and sit in the sun for a minute. So We've been doing it for about six years, and we've taken hundreds of people up the lake. And, we'd we'd love it. I don't think there's a better place in the world to explore and have such an amazing experience on the water than lake powell. So you've you've been doing it for about six years. You and I've talked and you mentioned that you've been using radios for about five of those six. What was it like before you started using radios? Well, it's interesting because, I've actually been using radios the whole time as a guide, not me personally. When I went to the park service, to get a permit to do this. This was interesting. They first initially denied me the permit. They says you cannot use personal watercraft for commercial purposes. Nobody had done this before. So I went back and I says, you know, I really talked to him and they said, we'll put together a program So I put together a list of everything. And one of my things that I told them that every individual would have a radio that we could communicate with that was their biggest concern is that when you're leading other people or guiding other people on a water, body of water where there's other boats and vessels crossing your path or, you know, coming behind you and passing people, they were worried we wouldn't be able to keep track of our people. So I assured them that we would have radios. And so the what we did is we I looked around and I read all the reviews. Was not familiar with Icom. I bought four. I had four machines at time. So about five Icom m twenty fives and but we never looked back. They are so wonderful to use to communicate. So I comes been with you from the beginning? From the beginning. Yeah. We've tried a couple other brands that somebody had recommended one time. I and I just wasn't happy with the clarity, with the distance that we could talk. And so I did try another brand for like you know, a week or two. Two of them that somebody had given me and they I just went back to Icom. They're they're just very dependable. The battery life the clarity. We don't get them wet too often, but in the summertime, you know, if somebody just jump off the machine with the radio on their vest and and it gets all wet and they freak out thinking they ruined the radio. It says, nah, it's great. Hop back on and away we go. So we love the icon radios. Well, you did touch on one of the one of the number one questions we get at a boat show is how far can we talk? And it's it's good to hear that kind of story because we we really start getting into the technicalities about curvature of the planet, how far from the a boat deck to boat deck using a couple of handhelds. But have you run into a situation where the groups spread out farther than you your radios would talk. You know, we have, one of the challenges at Lake Powell that makes it unique. It's it's not just a big wide open body of water. There's lots of canyons. And and I say canyons that could be fifty feet wide or ten feet wide or two hundred feet wide. And walls on each side may be five hundred feet tall. And so you go up around a couple corners, we're not gonna be able to communicate. There's just no line of sight. There's no there's no way. We usually get around one to maybe one and a half corners and then we're good. But we've noticed on the open area, you know, we've had two two miles, three miles sometimes straight up that we can just talk just fine. You know, that's line of sight with nothing in the way. We're we're not very high above the water. You know, we're pretty low with these machines, but they were fantastic. We typically don't get spread out too far. Funny, that you'd mentioned that. I just got back from the Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show and on the open water, the people that we were talking to, you would never think about talking about canyons. But in your your particular situation in a lot of the inland waterways, the rivers. You get a land mass in between a couple of boats or Like on the Mississippi River, you've got barges and tugs and things like that. Once they go around the bend, it it becomes a little bit more difficult as far as the distance. Well, you know, and something on that, it's not just handhelds that have that challenge. You know, we have a big vessel with, you know, big antennas on the top and, you know, we're fifteen feet above the water. And we have the same issues going around the corners in these canyons and you know, you lose that. You don't you don't have the ability to communicate. So I think the handhelds, you know, they hold their own pretty good. And I'm glad to hear they they work perfectly for what you wanna do, and we ended up being the radio of choice. You like the m twenty five. I think on your your last batch, we convinced you to go with the m ninety fours, and that seemed to be a little bit of overkill for what you guys are doing. The IAS, we don't use that. The battery life did seem to last as long just because of all the features. M twenty five is a little thinner, fits in the lifejack a little bit better. The battery. We've done on, you know, three four day trips, and we've used these for three straight days without the battery going dead. We turn them off at night. Turn them on the next morning and they work just fine without recharging. One of the things that we have done in the personal watercraft community is we've really helped educate other riders who ride in other areas. There's a big following for the PwC enthusiasts all over the world from Australia to, you know, Miami to LA that ride on the ocean all the time in groups. Or they'll ride on rivers. And it's now become mandatory on a lot of these clubs that they all carry radios when they go so they can communicate. It wasn't all that way always that way in the past. You take a group of people. You have fifty riders or ten riders, and you always get somebody who's behind or maybe isn't keeping up with the group and there was no way to communicate with them. Now all these groups, from Florida that LA and New Zealand and Australia all require, people to, you know, riders to use radios. And, so we we tell people all the time that's the best radio we've ever found. Well, I greatly appreciate that. And you're you're right. There's been some incredible videos that I've seen on his Seadu channel. One of them is a young man out of Miami that goes deep sea fishing with his Seadu. Yeah. He's a he's a great guy. And just looking at some of the stuff he catches is just mind blowing. But he and another guy, they they did a video of going from Miami all the way down to the Bahamas. Yes. Of course, they they did have a chase boat with them to make sure they had plenty of fuel and things like that. But, man, it looked like a that looked like a fun ride. Yeah. Emmanuel came out and did an overnight trip with me on Lake Powell, and he was really good at catching the fish. And he we had a great time. And, actually gave him one of my icon radios, and then I think he ended up in a bad storm somehow losing it. So there might be an extra one floating out there somewhere. Well, I have tried to reach out to him to to see how we can help him because the the video that I first saw at, last year, he definitely had an m ninety four, and it it was in one of the the beauty shots of of what they were doing. And I'm like, oh, man. Thank you very much. Yeah. That was the one I gave him when he was out here. And, I think he end up losing it. He said in Mexico. You went down on a ride down there somewhere. So we gotta get him we gotta get him on the other one. And there's a couple other people who do a lot of fishing and and exploring on the seedoos that we've helped out with. And, and we get a lot of people that come here. They're right in other areas, and they'll come here on Lake bow, and they may come here unprepared with the radio. So we've always outfitted them and let them either borrow one or we'll give one if we have an extra one to help educate people that these radios are not just communication, you know, back and forth to your friends. You know, you got the marine at channels nine and sixteen that the park service and other, you know, coast guard monitor. You know, you always got that little tether to somebody that can help out in case of an emergency. And that's that's a really good, you know, piece of insurance to have. Yeah. Not not only nine and sixteen, but if you do any of the Great Lakes tour or what they call the Great Circle, you need to be able to communicate with other vessels on the rivers like we mentioned before, but also to communicate with the harbor masters for the locks. To to go through those. I mean, you don't wanna just be sitting there floating, waiting for a boat to by chance come through. Well, I'll give you an example for us, When do we do our winter solstice ride, we drive a hundred miles. There's no fuel. There's no stopping for a hundred miles on Lake Powell. We go from Huawei to, Bullfrog marina. And in December, there's nobody there. I mean, the the field docs have to stay open, but there's no customers. So they lock the pumps. And then when you get close to them, you call them on channel sixteen. So, hey, we're here to get some fuel. Can you come down and open the docks? They they monitor the radio. They come down. They turn on the pumps. We refuel and head on our way. So having that ability to communicate to the land stations as really, really good. Oh, that's that is important to know. I'm I mean, we we hear about how Oh, if you got a cell phone, you've got communications, but that's not always the case. Correct. Also, in in this area, most people use channel that, you know, other voters are on six, channel sixty nine or sixty eight. And those are the public channels around here that seem to be most commonly used. So we're always communicating with other boats. You know, we were up the one time and we're going up the lake and there was a houseboat towing a couple of, watercraft behind them and the rope broke and started floating behind them and they kept going. They were unaware of that. So we're able to just reach out on our channel and say, hey, how spelled whatever the name was, you know, I realized you just lost your machines and and they could have driven for miles and not realized it, but because we had our radios, we could communicate to them and and they stopped and able to hook back up and and go on their journey. So it's always good to be able to communicate with other people where cell phone would not have there's no coverage out here for cell phones. You know, we go hundred miles with it. No cell phone coverage. So, radios are important. And the chance that you'd know the cell phone number of the pilot of that house boat is gonna be slim to nine. Exactly. And, you know, we we might be fishing up a place and you get five, six guys up there fishing in different locations. And all of a sudden, one guy starts hooking up or finds a school, and all he has to do is say, hey, John, Man, I'm hammering them over here. Come on over, and then they can all come and meet up. So they are really, really handy. Not only for safety, but just convenience. So the other thing we do also is we have the Canam adventures, which is the side by side, UTV tours all around the mountains of, you know, the canyons Lake Powell. And for that one, we use the ICV ten MR. That's a great little two way radio. That we use to communicate between the the guide cars. And these are handhelds. They've got, several different channels. And so it's always private and, they're amazing. So Icom has really come through for us, with some great communication devices to keep us in great communication with our clients and keep everybody safe. Okay. So this is something we worked really closely with CDW on. This is a the new Explorer PDF, personal or PFD personal flow station device life jacket, and it's got a great pocket for the icon radio. And then the microphone speaker connects on that little strap right there. So if you can see that, that keeps it right there so you can just reach up with your hand. Use the microphone. Use the speaker. It's right by your ear. You've got that with you all the time. And so it makes communication just amazing. Without this little strap up here that they put in now, you have to put the radio, the microphone somewhere else, and it's it doesn't isn't as effective. So it's works out. Yeah. With with it that low on the chest, you get more engine noise than you do human noise. Exactly. And it's not close enough to your ear to be able to hear it when you're driving. So it's a it's a great thing. CD was done. And we really appreciate them listening to us and Now this is in production for this next year that everybody able to have that. And, you know, as we educate more people on the on the importance of a handheld radio when you're on the water. Especially if you're by yourself, and a lot of people do solo writing. This is a great way to to to manage that and to put it on there without having to, you know, worry about where you're gonna put it and and, it's always with you. That's what's nice about this. Some people take a handheld they'll throw it in their in their city or their personal watercraft and they'll have it in the in the, you know, storage compartment. So if they need it, they can get it. But if you get you know, knocked off your machine or you're floating or something or, you know, you gotta get to it right away or there's a vessel approaching and you gotta you gotta say, hey or something. It's right there. You don't have time sometimes to reach down and dig through and turn it on. And this way, it's always on. It's always at their fingertips. This is an amazing, feature that we're so excited for to have this year. And, really kudos to see That that PFT looks like it's very comfortable to wear. I remember as a kid and even at the boat show, they still sell them. The the big orange ones that will have the cushion behind the head, and then it it ends up being real big and bulky. But that right there looks like it it becomes a a piece of you and it's very comfortable comfortable to wear. Yeah. This one's great. The orange ones actually are coast guard approved for using with a personal watercraft. But these are great because they actually actually have a camera mount here, like, for a GoPro or something you can put on there. Extra pockets. This is great, but the radio being able to put that right there all the time. You take your vest off. Set it down. It's right there with you. You can put it back on. It's great. So I Com radio works per fits perfectly and it works amazing. So Who does to see do for being forward thinking and and doing that for you guys, and then making it available to any consumer as well. Yeah. It's, again, it's just about being safe out there and and, you'll have a great time, you know, usually on the water, but if you're not safe, it'll change everything. And so and and just been able to talk to your friends and talk to other people and communicate. It's it's it's a good thing. So as we look at wrapping this up, for anybody interested. How do they find you and how do they get in contact with you? It's real simple. Uplake adventures dot com. Everything's right there. Well, thank you very much for joining us today, and, look forward to doing some more with you. And, and I know I've gotta make my way out there. To go on one of your adventures. You know, definitely, we keep throwing that invite out to you guys and, need to come down and see your stuff in action and really see how well it works. That that sounds like that would be an incredible team building trip right there. I agree.