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and other people that do use the river. There is a tre- mendous amount of recreation due to boating, hunt- ing, and fishing on the Missouri River and in our particular area from Ponca to Omaha. Starting out at the top, I'm basically at the top in Sioux City, there's not too much above us for marinas, we have 375 slips, the marinas across from us on down to the Light House Marina at Whiting and on through to Decatur, Cottonwood Marina. Then we have Fort Honeycreek, Dodge Park, and Sand Piper Cove, all of which total 1,100 slips. There's boats on the river, you might be surprised, from as big as 60' on down to 14' that basically use the river. So there's a wide variety of different. size vessels that use the river. In the past years we have suffered a lot with low water and surprisingly, even high water. I have a few slides I will show you, but we have both ends of it as do the farmers along the river, who probably suffer more from the high water. One of the big problems we think is causing some of our low water problems is degradation of the river. I'm sure everyone's heard of degradation a considerable amount. But to keep it short, I'll show you some pictures of the marina. This is Cimmarina with a normal eighteen to twenty foot river flow. Chet had a little better view of the marina from an aerial view. That's when the docks are floating at normal levels. That shows about an eighteen foot river stage. Most of us along the river can function well with an 18 to 20-foot river stage. Again, that's just a normal river. These are some slides that were taken last spring. We got trapped with the situation of the least terns and piping plovers. This is a picture of 13.8 foot river stage. You can see the mud. The water is where we dredged. We got involved in an extensive dredging sit- uation to help lower the bottom of the marina, but all of us with marinas along the river are having the same problem. Most of our marinas were built 15 to 20 years ago. At that point in time the river was running between 22 to 24 foot normal river stage. In 1987 we functioned with a 17 foot river stage which leaves a lot of our marinas in this kind of a situation. These are some of the 40 and 50 foot boats. You can see they are all high and dry at this particular time. The only ones getting any good out of them was the ducks. The highest priced boat we have is about $250,000. There are some in the Omaha area that are even more expensive. Needless to say, we get a lot of flack from our cus- 44 tomers when they come and see their $80,000 to $90,000 houseboat sitting high and dry in the mud. This is a picture along the northern side of our mar- ina. You can see where we ran the dredge in there trying to lower the harbor. We dug out about four feet so you can imagine what it is like. Right now we've got about 1-1/2 foot of water with our river stage so we are gaining on it. This is a picture Chet had that shows the houseboat. It was about 1-1/2 feet out of the water this spring. You can see some of the damage that I caught at Cimmarina here with the dock being broken up. We estimated between $50,000 to $60,000 wortb of damage just in an overnight period when the water completely fell of this spring. We also have the other end of it. This is 1984 when we got flooding. These are some people trying to use their boats. We cabled our docks so they wouldn't float away. This particular time the river rose to about 31' river stage. This year it was seventeen, so it was about a twenty foot difference. We do have an up and down situation as far as the amount of water. There were a few brave souls that tried to go ahead and get down to their boats, but it was a little tough when the walkways were all under water. This is our parking lot with about two feet of water in it. That's my showroom. We were sitting in about four inches of water, or about mop board deep, in 1984. It made it a little tough, but we survived pretty well in that 1984 thing. The water came in at 5:00 in the morning on a Monday and at 3:00 in the afternoon we had several people with squeegees, mops and buckets get- ting the mud and silt out of our offices and the show- room. One thing they always say about the Missouri River, "It's too thin to plow and too thick to drink," so that's what we had was a lot of mud. Things that would help us in the marina business would be some way to slow the degradation on the river. The other thing is to have a more constant water flow in the months that we have to use it which is primarily April through October. We understand the flooding, because we are at both ends of it and like I said, I've lived on the river all my life and I do know the ups and downs of the river flows. The floods and the low water which we have experienced here. The other thing is, and we are working on that with the Corps of Engineers, is a little better situation of informing the general public as to when they are going to make these fluctuations. The Corps does a real good job of trying to get it into the newspapers, which un- fortunately, a lot of people don't get until after it's too