Navajo Lake Marina completes $4 Million in improvements 

Boaters who want to cool off from the summer heat will benefit from upgraded amenities at the Navajo Lake Marina at Navajo Lake State Park. You're watching Farmington Local News, brought to you by The Big Idea Makerspace at San Juan College and Boon's Family Thai BBQ. An August storm brought 80-mile-per-hour winds that damaged existing docks at the marina and spurred $4 million in improvements.

We ended up tearing out over 150 boat slips this last year and putting in about 170 slips to replace 'em. It was kind of on our 10-year plan and everything got consolidated into a matter of months. So Mother Nature had other plans for us, so we went with it and got it done in one short winter.

The new boat houses include the 100, 200, 300, 800 and 1,000 docks. They feature covered slips from 24 to 75 feet in length. The improvements include higher roofs and wider walkways that meet modern code and ADA regulations. The marina also will use polyethylene encapsulated floats in place of styrofoam floats to reduce their impact on the environment.

Got everything put in, and putting all the boats back in place where they go. We do have a few vacancies with the new slips that were added, but I think those have been filling about one slip a day. So I think here in a couple weeks we'll be totally sold out. We're excited about it.

The Marina worked with Meeco Sullivan, one of the largest dock builders in the country. The docks were fabricated in Oklahoma and transported to the lake for installation by the marina maintenance crew. The project is the latest and largest phase of upgrades the marina has made during the past decade. It invested $20 million in total.

I think it's going to be a great summer. Our park visitation has ticked up every year. Today, there's just under a million people that drive through that park gate. We don't have a way of actively tracking what percentage of them come down to the marina itself versus going up into the parks, but it's a big percentage. We're really excited about it.

Visitors can look forward to festivities on National Marina Day in June and Pirates Day over Labor Day weekend.

So all our slip holders will come out here. Big percentage of 'em decorate their boats like pirate ships. They dress up like pirates. And then what's really cool is that maybe 10% of 'em, so 30 or 40 boats will actually go out on the water. They'll go to Harbor Freight or wherever, buy these trash pumps that shoot 100 gallons of water a minute. And we basically have a grownups' water fight with four or five hoses on each boat that are shooting 100 gallons a minute, and we just shoot each other's boats. Everybody's soaked. It's a great day out there.

To learn more about this and other local news stories, visit farmingtonlocal.news. Thank you for watching this edition of the Local News Network. I'm Ryan Simonovich.