LAKEVILLE, Minn. -- Wally Potter never pictured himself as the manager of a marina, but it's starting to look that way on the lake side of his home.
"Yeah, Wally's marina," he laughs.
The beach off his Lakeville home has become more crowded now that three of Wally's neighbors are tying up their boats at his dock.
"We're just temporarily letting them have space," he says.
The docks at Wally's neighbors' homes now sit several feet up in the air, with mud and lily pads beneath them. The docks are no longer accessible to even small boats due to falling lake levels, due to drought.
On Thursday morning Lakeville parks supervisor Tony Novak peered through binoculars at a lake level gauge for the weekly reading for Lake Marion. The reading is down again, more than two inches from a week ago.
"We didn't get any rain here," he explains. Nothing in the past week. Water levels on Lake Marion are down more than a foot since May.
Fishing piers on the lake are now a good cast away from water and the lake's two boat launches are much trickier to navigate than usual.
"Normally a trailer like this you could drive it on no problem," says Tom Ullrich as he works to get his runabout on its steeply pitched trailer.
Lake Marion has fallen to lower levels in both the 1960s and 1980s, but some Eastern Minnesota lakes are at historic lows level, forcing the DNR to reposition dozens of lake gauges that didn'tt read low enough anymore.
Wally Potter has lost several feet of his lake; but his beach is a lot bigger. And hey, how many people can say they have their own fleet. "Yeah, my fleet," he laughs.
Click here for the DNR Lake Finder
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