Overnight on my Boat In a Dangerous Storm - [Cross Country Trip EP. 18]

Episode 18 of towing this 22-foot Grady weight all over the United States, starting at the lowest point in the continental US, Key West, Florida. We've gone all the way across the United States and now we are here at Lake Shasta in California, an incredibly popular lake. Let's get in the lake and see what this place has to offer. Just pulled up to Shasta. This is absolutely blowing my mind already. This place is enormous. I had no idea that it's actually the biggest reservoir in the entire state of California. 395 miles of shoreline. And it has a huge houseboat scene here. The amount of houseboats behind me just at this one marina is insane. I think there's seven marinas at this lake. I don't know what I was thinking on my way here. I thought maybe there'd be one marina here and no houseboats. I was completely off on my drive here. I had no idea. You can just see the water level behind me. It's like 70 feet down right now. Apparently, every spring, this lake's all the way full up to that top waterline out there. I guess this whole parking lot where all the boat trailers are is normally underwater. And everything up here is no trailer parking. Whenever it's full, what do people do? But regardless, it's pretty freaking cool. I have a lot of stuff to throw into the water. What the... I have a lot of stuff to get out of the truck, throw into the boat, get it ready, go down this huge ramp right here. We're going to go camp out on the lake somewhere. We're going to find somewhere way out there. The weather is not looking very favorable. It's supposed to rain tonight and pretty much all day tomorrow. That's what the weather says right now. We're not going to let a little storm and rain stop us from boating. We boat rain or shine. Let's get packed up and let's get in that water. All right, Shasta Lake officially wins the award for the worst boat trailer parking by far. This is insane. I mean, I know that this is like normally underwater at the beginning of the year, but it was gnarly getting in here and turning around and finding a spot. Like, look at this rut right here. There's a huge one right there that like, there's no way I'd be going through that with my trailer. Shasta Lake boat trailer parking, one out of 10. It is windy and rainy and nasty. I'm really hoping that this little bit of nice sky peaks through and saves the rest of this evening. I don't know, we might just be fighting wind and rain all night. I guess right now would be a good time to tell you guys to check out some merch. This is one of the hoodie designs that has a boat anchor surrounded by all the mean comments from my channel. This is one of the newer designs, simple compass on the front with my initials, and then it's got the Grady White on the back. But check it out at explorewithbrandon.com. Coffee cups, stickers, hats, shirts, hoodies. Got a bunch of stuff on there and it's a great way to support this channel. I appreciate every single one of you guys that has purchased something already. It means the absolute world to me. Freaking love you guys. And if you haven't bought anything, absolutely fine. You're here watching the video and that is incredible. We launched at the Bridge Bay Marina. $25 a day, 50 bucks for me. I paid for it today and tomorrow because I plan on sleeping out here somewhere tonight. It's kind of like Florida prices. So they built the Shasta Dam between 1935 and 1945. Took a decade and they built a 600-foot tall dam way back then. It was very impressive. There's also a few towns submerged underneath here, like a lot of reservoirs in the country that I found out. It's completely flooded and took over the town of Kennet and a couple other real small mining towns. Completely buried and sunken underwater. I don't know, buried underwater. Whatever you want to say. Allegedly, whenever the water gets really low, like in some droughts or towards the end of the season, you can apparently see some of the foundations and some structures still left from Kennet. It's still raining right now, but I think that it might be clearing up this way. Fingers crossed. We're only at 1,000 feet elevation right now. So this is the first time I felt full power in my boat in a while. All the lakes I've been to have been pretty high elevation where my boat's very sluggish and very slow. Also, I don't have eight people on this boat like I did in the last video. Feels like a completely different boat. And it looks like it's clearing up for us. We might have an absolutely gorgeous sunset. The freaking sun's out, baby! This right here is Slaughterhouse Island. You can see photos from when the lake was full. It's kind of crazy to see from this to when it's full and there's a whole bunch of boats all up against the tree line. And now we're like 70 feet below that. You can pretty much pull up anywhere on this lake and camp. I'm not too too concerned about finding a camp spot. I got a half an hour left until sunset. I pulled the boat over to get close to this island just to see what the actual beach is looking like. Because from far away they always look nice and inviting. You get up close and it's just all full of rocks and boulders and kind of destroy the keel of your boat. A little bit rocky. Some of it's like crazy rocky down this way with huge boulders that would just destroy my boat. And also there's freaking deer on this island. Literally right up just like chomping on this tree right here. It's a pretty small island. So I don't know if they just always are on the island or like maybe they swim across. Do deer swim? I have no idea. But I just thought it was weird to see deer on this island. I gotta be careful. It's called Slaughterhouse Island. They're gonna, they might get slaughtered out there. I don't know if you can see the rainbow. There's a freaking rainbow right there. So I might just cruise a little bit more. Enjoy this last little bit of glow from this sick sunset and find a nice spot to camp. And literally in a matter of seconds, the rain is back. I don't think it's going to last too long. Oh, actually, I don't know. Hopefully the weather's not coming from that way. That looks really bad. Let's hope it's coming from this way or that way. This is normally where the water goes through and makes Slaughterhouse Island. But I guess when the water's so low, it's not an island anymore. It's just a big giant peninsula, which now makes sense why there's deer on it. I wonder if it's safe to be on a boat during a crazy lightning storm that's right above my head. Hey chat, is it dangerous to be on a boat in the middle of a crazy thunder lightning storm? Yeah, being out on a boat in the middle of a big thunder and lightning storm is definitely not ideal and can be dangerous. Lightning tends to strike tall or isolated objects and a boat on open water can definitely fit that bill. Plus rough water conditions and heavy winds can make things even riskier. So it's usually best to head to shore and wait it out if you see a storm coming. All right, so I am an isolated lightning rod in the middle of the lake right now. Yeah, probably isn't a good idea to be out in the middle of a storm out in the water because, yeah. That was some solid thunder right there. This is not ideal boating conditions at all. It's coming down pretty good and there has been lightning strikes on all sides of me. I just nosed up against this wall right here just to kind of get out of the middle of the lake, stay away from being a lightning rod out there. Thank goodness that I have the walk around. If I was just stuck in a center console right now, that would really suck. This is one of the absolute main reasons that I got to walk around instead of the center console. And this is reinforcing why I will always have a boat with some sort of protection inside. I guess most people probably just would have chosen not to go boating when the weather was so bad, but we don't got time to sit at every lake and wait around till we have good weather. We go rain or shine. We got places to see, lakes to also see. Oh. What am I doing with my life? We got a freaking river forming coming down in. Storm finally passed. I'm leaving this little spot. I don't really like it. It's just like weird vibes in this spot. It's too tucked in. I can't really see much around. I want to go find a little bit better of a spot. Something that's not so steep as well. That place was really freaking steep. I looked at the radar for the first time. Probably shouldn't have done that before, but the worst part of the storm just went by. I'm in a little bit of a clear spot and then I may get hit by another really bad storm in about a half an hour. So I'm going to try to use this little moment for my break to go find somewhere less steep and better to camp. Well, I'm trying to find a better spot, but everything seems to be super rocky and everywhere seems to be super steep. So I'm not really sure what to do. Also, yes, I know there have been a lot of comments in the past telling me that I need to move this light bar because it hits the front of the boat and then blinds me. And you're 100% correct about that. I do need to move it. I've just been lazy and it's just one of those things I keep putting off. But I kind of want to mount it all the way up on the front bow rail. I feel like that would be the best. I hate moving the wiring around. It's such a pain. One day I'm going to do it though. I promise. But I don't know. I'm going to keep searching for a little while. Hopefully I will find a nice spot protected from any wind and protected from wake from other boats and not crazy steep and not crazy rocky. Am I asking for too much? Maybe, who knows, but let's go. Well, this is going to be home for the night. I went around to a bunch of different spots to look for anywhere decent, but everywhere has just got a bunch of rocks and really steep. This place still has rocks, but I just had to commit to it. I couldn't keep looking around. It was driving around in nighttime and the rain is not one of my favorite activities, but I'm in this pretty cool, really, really narrow like canyon. This is the very end of it right here. So I got literally walls on both sides of me, well, three sides of me. Just threw an anchor out the front, but I have an anchor also off the stern of the boat up the hill that way because I don't want my boat to drift this way because there's giant rocks on the side here. It'll definitely hit into the side of my wrap and screw the boat up. This side is a little bit more sandy mixed with rocks and the front also sandy mixed with rocks. It's the best I could do for right now. So this is going to be home for the night and it's only 8.30 PM right now. I normally only sleep like five hours a night. If I go to sleep now, I'm going to be awake in the middle of the night. I'm going to crawl inside the boat, hang out for a while, maybe do some editing. Don't really know. I got to kill some time because I normally don't go to sleep till pretty late. All right, I climbed up the hill next to my boat. You can see it in the background back there. It actually cleared up pretty freaking nice. The second part of the storm missed me. So it's been no rain for probably like an hour now. The sky's actually clearing up. The moon came out. It's so freaking bright from the moonlight that I can walk around with no headlamp, no flashlight, no nothing. I can literally just see. It's crazy. But this little cove is definitely a solid spot. I can see some pretty big ripples farther out where the wind is still kind of heavy out there. But back in this little cove where I'm at is super protected, super quiet. The boat's not moving a freaking inch. It's going to be a very nice night of sleep tonight. I'm excited. Time to crawl in here. One thing that is absolutely incredible about here is there's no bugs. I don't know if that's because of the storm or what the deal is. I don't know why, but I have these. I never ever put these inside lights on, especially not with the door open. And I don't have a single freaking bug in here. Normally, if I have any lights outside, even those blue lights or the underwater lights or anything, my navigation lights, they're swarmed with bugs. And usually it's absolutely disgusting. And just like Flaming Gorge was unbearable at nighttime in the spot that I was camping. I couldn't even have the light on my phone. Like I don't even look at the screen on my phone. It was so bad. But here, zero freaking bugs. And I don't know why. But all right, catch you guys in the morning. Good morning. Slept freaking amazing out here. A little bit of light rain last night. Stayed super protected back here in this little nook. And it was just completely flat, glassy, calm water. But not that bad of a spot to wake up. I mean, some could argue that this is not so nice just because it's mud everywhere. But I think it's pretty freaking awesome. Been here too long. It's time to get out and actually see this lake. Before that, I've been seeing these floating bathrooms out here on the lakes on the West Coast. This is pretty freaking cool. That looks like really nice bathrooms. Someone told me about some giant train tunnels that are abandoned that are around this area somewhere. But I think that they're only visible whenever the water levels are down low enough. And I don't think that they're quite low enough because I heard that it's pretty obvious when you see it. And I'm not seeing it. I just cruised 20 miles from where I camped last night. Stopped at the marina where I launched my boat at just to check on my e-bike because my tracker was showing that it was in a different location and it was scaring me, but it's still there. It's all good. And now I am way deep down the Pit River Arm looking for a spot to just chill, cook some food. I'm starving. And I found this spot here where all these trees are like flooded here. It's kind of cool. It's also kind of creepy. Kind of reminds me of like, I don't know the proper word for it and there's no cell service here, so I can't Google it. But sub-mechanophobia. It's like where people are like super creeped out about like man-made sunken objects, I'm pretty sure. But I wonder what like the nature version of that like nature sunken objects. Sub-nature-canophobia. That's it. But it's very creepy to me to think that all these trees like it's pretty freaking deep here and these things must be huge. And also like maybe there's some other ones that are like inches below the surface that I can't see and then I don't want to run them over. But I do want to creep in here a little bit and check it out because it's pretty cool. It is 105 feet deep here and look at this. That means this tree's like 130, 140 feet tall. That's insane. I think it would be so cool to climb this thing and jump it. But there's a lot of branches underneath here that I can see just below the surface. And unless I got in there and really swam it well with goggles and made sure it was clear, there's no way I could do that. It'd be way too risky. One of my biggest fears is jumping off something and then getting skewered like a kebab and just being stuck impaled under the water. And this looks like the place that it would happen. But what a freaking unique jump this would be. And this tree looks super freaking climbable. I might climb it just to climb it. Let's cook some breakfast. All right, sad day. I bought this little thing so that I can cook up some simple one pan meals and I forgot to buy a lighter. So this is useless, which means I can't cook my eggs. Had some chicken sandwiches, I guess. I'm gonna eat this last little pre-made sandwich, some orange juice, maybe some Amy's chili. And of course, we got a banana. Always gotta have a banana on your boat. Don't let that superstition scare you. I'm super stoked on these new designs. I have another one right here. I just really like the way these things turned out. Got the grady white ripping through the water. It's just, I don't know. I think it's just a really cool design. Explorewithbrandon.com. Oops. Anyone that has bought merch, you guys are incredible. And everybody that watches this channel, seriously, you guys are amazing. You guys are the reason that I am able to do stuff like this and I am forever grateful for that because it's just... So many times I have moments like this where I'm just like, how is this actually my life? Like it's so, so incredible. I'm gonna cruise back towards the main section. There's something else I want to check out. We left the Pitt River Arm and now we are all the way back on the McLeod River Arm. I want to say about 15, 16 miles we cruised already from that spot with all the sunken trees. And the views over here, I got to say, are so much better. These mountains off to the side right here are crazy. Well, down the McLeod River Arm, I just found this big dock area here with all this infrastructure and it's only accessible by boat over here. But it's these giant caverns that are way up in the mountain. And I came by my own boat. All these people came on this big one right here and we're hopping on this bus. Gonna go check out these caves. So this entrance that we're coming into right now is actually one that they blasted in here to make it easier to get in. They just blew up all this kind of like mining. But the regular entrance, the natural cave entrance, is 300 feet above this. But I guess they don't allow anyone to use that. So we're going in this way. I guess we enter in from the bottom of the cave going up. So apparently this cave is 3.5 million years old doing all the backdating on the slag tides and all that stuff. They believe there was Native Americans living in here for many, many, many years before anyone actually documented this cave and then built all these steps and whatnot. We've been in here for a half hour already. It's kind of hard to talk to the camera because the tour guide's speaking and a lot of people just part, but... Whoa. So this is apparently how they used to be coming in here when they were first exploring everything. That's kind of crazy. The leader of this group. Oh, there we go. There's the exit right here. Pretty crazy to be in there for over an hour, come out to views like this. Insanity. I'm not the biggest fan of commercializing caves just because they kind of ruin everything inside and just throw staircases and railings and drill into everything. They break a bunch of formations and all that. But I do got to say the LED light show with speakers and everything was pretty freaking cool. If you're ever out in this area, I recommend it. It was 45 bucks for the tour and that's with your own boat or if you take their boat. I was hoping it'd be a little bit cheaper if I drove my own boat over, but same price. But 45 bucks for an hour long tour and a really sick LED sound show. It was very, very unique, but enough with the caving. Let's get back down this mountain and get back into this water. We're back on the boat now. And I got to say, I feel like death. Pretty much right whenever I got to the cave up there. I don't know. It's like a sickness just decided to hit me like a truck as soon as I went inside. I just, oh, I feel really bad right now but we will power through. I'm going to try to head down to the Shasta Dam because I want to see the very end. I don't know. I don't like tours. So this is my own opinion. Forgive me. The walking around tour, like very slow moving. You know, I'm a very antsy guy. I can't really sit still much. I'd say the tour part, I'll give it a two. The light show at the end, give it a solid eight, nine maybe. But overall the cave is insane. It's just, it's kind of, I don't know. It always sucks to see super awesome caves like that just destroyed by concrete and rebar, lighting, sound all that stuff. I don't know. I'm, I'm mixed on it and now I'm rambling. Well, let's go check out the dam. Ripped a wide open throttle for about nine miles. And here we are. We made it to the Shasta Dam. It's pretty crazy that that thing is like 85 years old just 600 foot tall wall of concrete. That's holding all this water here. And if that broke, I'll be going for a ride. Dams are just crazy. Oh, apparently also the town of Kennet is below here around this area as well. One of the allegedly 15 towns that were submerged and flooded when they built the dam. At least that's what the tour guide from the cave told me. I haven't even told you the temperature of the water. It's a, it's one of my favorite things to do. I don't know why, but it's 75 and a half degrees. The outside temperature is actually 72. So the water's warmer than the air right now. And this might be the first lake that I don't swim in just because with whatever this sickness is that I have right now, I'm even colder. I don't know. 72 degrees feels really cold right now. And the sickness is definitely amplifying it. But normally I'd be jumping in. It's probably just not a good idea for me. If I'm sick, I need to get better so I can get a video up for next week too. It's pretty peaceful. Just floating here above the 600 foot dam, no engine, no music, just sitting and relaxing. Shasta Lake is a very top tier lake. I had no idea what to expect as per usual when I go to all these places, but we're driving north after this. We're going hopefully up into Canada or at least going to make it to Seattle. If the regulations are too tricky to get my boat across the border, I'll probably loop there and start heading south. But I'm hoping to get up to some crazy lakes up in Canada before it gets too cold. I don't know if I mentioned it in the beginning of this video, but I've had a lot of comments asking why I don't stay in each location longer and why I'm rushing through everything so much. And it's literally because I'm running out of summertime. I need to get up north before it starts snowing. So I have a lot of places to see and I'm skipping over a ton of locations that I wish I could go to. I just literally don't have the time. I'd love to hear some of your guys' suggestions of what you'd want me to do or what you want to see me do over the winter time. I'm toying with the idea of starting the Great Loop. If I can get a different boat for it, I definitely want to upgrade to a bigger boat, whether it be a massive trawler or something bigger than this, like the same style as this, but with twin engines, maybe triple engines if I could ever afford that. But for the autopilot, a lot more capable. I mean, this boat is absolutely incredible. I love this boat. I have no complaints about it. This boat has done everything I've ever wanted to do and more. So drop some comments down below of any ideas you guys have for the winter time. Beautiful. The amount of times I have launched and hauled this thing out by myself is really getting up there. It's time to head to the next lake. I got a four-hour drive ahead of me. I'm going to go stop at a friend's house and try to recover from whatever the heck this sickness is and then get right back out there and get to the next location. So I'll see you guys next week for another video. Thank you guys so much for watching this one. Seriously, you guys are the best. Grab some merch for the millionth time in this video. I think I've said it too much. Peace.