Grand Lake(St Marys)

12 Noon EDT

Grand

Lake, Lake St Marys, Grand Reservoir, Celina Reservoir, etc.....Grand Lake as we all call it on the Celina side of the lake has been around since 1837 or so....for the history of Grand Lake go here:

http://www.grandlake.net/go/history.shtml

My family moved to Celina back in the fall of 1962 from the sun baked town of Venice, Florida, located squarely on the Gulf of Mexico. Celina was on a large body of water as well...an inland lake called Grand Lake, at one time Grand Lake was the largest man made body of water in the world....it's still the largest one dug by hand...approximately 10 miles long and 3 miles wide the lake consists of 17,500 or so acres. Not deep by any standards, the lake runs between 4 and 10 feet deep, depending on the amount of rain fall in any season.....at one time a great fishing lake, it is now surrounded by condos and has become mostly a ski, sail, and party boat lake....fishing of any quality is gone....still some catfish, crappie, and a few large mouth bass remain, but there are better places for anglers.

After spending my time as a youngster living a few blocks east of the Gulf, Grand Lake was different...but I did spend much of my Junior High School days fishing for Cats and Crappies in the back waters of the lake.

The lake is now known by it's festival activities in the summer months....The Freedom Days in early July, The Lake Festival, the last weekend in July, and the Governor's Cup Regatta (Hydroplane races) the last weekend before Labor Day.

photos:

Yesterday at the boat races....and a shot of the south island area of Grand Lake

Yesterday finished off the races, and I spent a few hours down that way watching and doing some photographing.....

Interesting how Grand Lake/Lake St. Marys/Grand Lake St. Marys got it's official name....we think it is now known as Grand Lake St. Marys...St Marys, our ugly step-sister of a town is located on the eastern edge on the lake, while Celina on the west and Montezuma on the south are located directly on the water....St Marys managed to get the name locked in by a politician of the ruling GOP many years ago...he represented them, while our rep was a Democrat...thus St. Marys got it's name included in the Lake's title, even though not actually located on the shores.....good political move in my view...but Celina residents refuse to this day to call it (Grand) Lake St Marys.....stubborn Germans they are[what they got for voting Democrat, something that seldom happens around these parts today].

Freshman football at Coldwater this afternoon, against a rival school Maria Stein Marion Local.....both teams along with St. Henry are state powers each and every year, and produce many Ohio State(Todd Boeckman, Ross Homan this year) and NFL(Jim Lachey, Bobby Hoying, Jeff Hartings) players....even at the freshman level, these games usually are pretty intense.....should be a good one.

47 Years Ago

___________finished up the summer of 1960 visiting our future home of Celina, on the lake. Spent the last month of school vacation visiting our family friends, Jon and Sharon Swoveland, who we knew from our days in Scott, Ohio...they had moved to Celina a few years earlier.

Main thing I remember is, I had contracted some nasty skin problems...viruses that were nasty, and took a month of intense treatment before Doc McElroy in Celina found the problem...gave me a shot in the butt cheek and a few days later I was cured...just in time to head back south to Venice where we would reside for another 2+ years

prh