It was back in 2008 when San Diegans were last able to wakeboard on San Vicente Reservoir before they shut it down to raise the dam. Well, word on the street is that a re-open day has been set for Thursday, 9/22, so the wait it finally over! Reservations will begin being sold by Ticketmaster (both online and over the phone) at 7:00 PM (PT) on Thursday, August 25th.

The lake will be open Thursday through Monday with Monday being a fishing-only day. Tickets will be available for purchase a week at a time four weeks prior to the date. For example, reservations for September 29th–October 2nd will be made available initially through Ticketmaster on Thursday, September 1st at 7 PM.

Reservations will be limited to 110 fishing boat launches and 40 water contact boat launches each day, plus an additional 50 vehicles without boats per day. I believe that's only about 30 more boats than they used to allow on the lake before the dam raise, Apparently, the limiting factor is going to be parking spots, so maybe this means the lake won't be quite as crowded as it was back in the day.

I can't find anything on the city or county websites about the opening, so I'm going to refer you to SD Fish for a breakdown of all the fees and hope they got it right. It's kind of confusing, but it looks like it will cost you $7 to launch your boat for wakeboarding, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. You'll have to pay an additional $10 for each person that wants to wakeboard. So if you and your three buddies are going to go wakeboarding on San V, it looks like you're going to have to pony up a whopping $47!! If you bring a friend along who isn't going to wakeboard, I believe that person has to pay an $8 fee for the pleasure of watching you wakeboard!

I hope I'm wrong on my interpretation of this fee schedule because the rates not only seem awfully high, but to charge someone for coming along to watch is just ridiculous and pretty much keeps families away! Don't even get me started on the fact that each additional fisherman (someone who removes resources, which have to be replenished, from the lake) is only charged $8 while each additional wakeboarder (someone who leaves no impact on the lake) is charged $10. Or the fact that there used to be a watersports-only day (Thursday) and now they've flip-flopped that into a fishing-only day (Monday). These policies seem heavily discriminatory against wakeboarders.

The folks over at SD Fish have also set up a special forum for buying and selling tickets to the lake, so if you can't get it from Ticketmaster, you might try going there. Unfortunately, it will probably be mostly fishing boat passes. It seems odd that people are going to be scalping tickets to a lake, but welcome to San Diego.