Retire on a Houseboat in Kentucky: A Floating Paradise on a Wooded Lake

A new twist on retirement community living is at so-called “Redneck Riviera” atop Kentucky’s Lake Cumberland, as The Christian Science Monitor reports in its June 15 edition. A buoyant lifestyle has retirees and boomers relaxing in houseboats that cost between a quarter of a million dollars and $1 million dollars.

These houseboat luxury water pavilions are as much as 110 feet long and have such nautical amenities as up to 5 bedrooms and 3 baths, Jacuzzis, water slides, wall-sized flat screen TVs, ambient lighting, and steering accommodations in the living room just beyond the flat screen TV. Many of these floating palaces never leave the dock, which is understandable since they go no more than a couple of miles an hour.

For the price of hundreds of thousands of dollars, these water-neighborhood dwellers opt for an upgrade to RV living. The closed-dock community of Conley Bottom Marina on Lake Cumberland, Kentucky is in rural farmland in foothills of southern Kentucky, reports The Monitor. The lake is a man-made lake that resulted when Wolf Creek Dam was built in 1950 and covers 60,000 plus acres. The whole expanse of Lake Cumberland is dotted with various sized houseboats, mostly, though, they are large and shiny new.

The Monitor quotes Lake Cumberland houseboat dweller Jack Sniff as saying that houseboaters “develop a dock…community… [in which] we know everyone’s names — we know the kid’s names, the dogs’s names.”

Houseboating is not exclusively American, by any means, although the lake communities in Kentucky have been called an new “American kind of frontierism.” Houseboats fill the Seine River in Paris on the right bank (looking downriver, the right bank is on the right) near the Orangerie. Houseboats with a distinct Chinese flair fill Aberdeen Harbor beside Hong Kong. Houseboats represent the ideal vacation or honeymoon retreat on Dal Lake in Kashmir.

In Handmade Houseboats: Independent Living Afloat author Russell Condor gives a brief historic look at houseboating. He says, for example, that Cleopatra’s barge, which she shared with Marc Antony, was an ancient example of a houseboat. In another example Condor explains that British civil servants in colonial India used to religiously escape the heat of summer to float in houseboats in the cool upper regions at Dal and Nagin lakes.

Houseboat-style retirement villages have seen houseboating in America “grown exponentially in scale and luxury,” as The Monitor puts it. But there is sometimes trouble in houseboat paradise. For example, there are currently concerns over the strength of Wolf Creek Dam, which created Lake Cumberland. The Monitor reports that the Army Corp of Engineers lowered the water level entering the Lake to ease the strain on the dam and decrease the chances of a breech in the integrity of Wolf Creek Dam.

The trouble at Wolf Creek Dam has unpleasant ramifications for Lake Cumberland houseboat dwellers. According to a Society of Environmental Journalists report, some 40 lake docks would be “high and dry” due to water level reductions, as would the luxury multi-level houseboats docked there; there would be threats to the power supply for 1 million customers, including those same houseboaters; there would be threats to the drinking water supply for 200,000 people. Worse yet, dam failure due to a breech could potentially flood some downstream towns to the point of wiping them “off the map.” The only optimistic note on the last potentiality is that the houseboaters would be able to maintain the roofs over their heads, even if others were wiped out.

This final gloomy note does not take the shine away from the gentle life of retirement and vacationing aboard a luxury houseboat floating along on one of southern Kentucky’s many beautiful lakes. It is a shame though that folks below Wolf Creek Dam are in potential jeopardy, including those floating on the 65,530-acre reservoir lake having 1,225 miles of peacefully wooded shoreline, Lake Cumberland.

Matthew Shaer, ” Houseboats: Living large on the ‘Redneck Riviera’.” The Christian Science Monitor. URL: http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0615/p13s02-lign.html?page=1

Reference:

• www.amazon.com/Handmade-Houseboats-Independent-Living-Afloat/dp/0071580220 Author, Russell Conder.