Disha Murugupandiyan - Week #15: The Tragedies of Lake Tahoe

If you ever mention visiting Lake Tahoe to me, even if I really want to visit the beautiful place now, the first thing that would come to mind is the bad luck my family has had there over the years. We’ve had blown tires, torn muscles, and the worst one happened when I was around the age of 7 or 8.


It was a warm, sunny day, and the first time that my family had visited Lake Tahoe during the summer. Usually, we would travel there during the winter and my sister and I would go skiing. Well, my parents used to go with us until my dad tore his meniscus one trip and didn’t realize until around 3 months later, getting surgery on it then.


Anyway, we were with both my aunt and uncle and their spouses from my mom’s side, and we decided that it would be a good idea to rent out a boat and take it out on the lake, even though we had never driven a boat before. The first half of the day was great, with fun banter and laughter, until we stopped in a certain part of the lake shaped like a small semicircle, the shore being made of huge rocks. We all started to play games, including extremely competitive UNO. When we looked to the shore, it looked awfully closer than it did 30 or 45 minutes ago. 


We had never put the anchor down. 


We tried to start the boat and it made this awful sound, one that confirmed the fact that the motor on the back of the boat was nicely lodged into the rocks. After using the radio to call for help and were told that we would need to wait 2-3 hours, we had the absolutely brilliant idea to at least try to get the boat out of the rocks. All by ourselves. All we had was a vague idea on the part of the boat and some very overconfident adults. My dad and two uncles got on the shore to push the boat away, and were actually successful for a bit. That was until the boat actually started to move away, and only my uncles were able to get on the boat before it started moving away. Before we knew it, my dad was stranded on the shore as the boat slowly moved away. Since the water was freezing cold and our boat couldn’t be turned back to the shore in fear of getting caught again, there was nothing we could do. 


That was until a kind family in a canoe much smaller than our motorized boat offered to throw him a rope and reel him into their canoe. And so he did, braving the freezing water and jumping into their canoe, which the family paddled closer to our boat away from the dangerous rocks. My dad finally jumped back in our boat: freezing but safe. We ended up waiting for another 3 or 4 hours for a boat to come tow us back. That’s just one of our bad experiences there. Even with this experience and others, I would love to visit Lake Tahoe again and get the chance to ski and snowboard. It’s definitely on my bucket list.

 


Comments

  1. Atharv DuaApril 18, 2026 at 10:09 PM

    Disha, your dad and Lake Tahoe might just have an ancestral rivalry. I find it really interesting that you have such vivid memories of a trip when you were seven, though your dad getting stranded on the shore was definitely an important one to remember. I can only imagine how absolutely terrified a seven year old might be with her dad on the shore: do you remember what your reaction was at the time? While other blogs have highlighted that we can associate memories with objects, music, emotions, or even vocabulary quizzes, yours extends that to places. If you’ve travelled somewhere multiple times (which you mentioned you have for Lake Tahoe), you will likely always think of some of the most important memories you built there. I know that sounds obvious, but I don’t think that’s the case for places that you’ve only taken trips to once. For example, I had the pleasure of visiting Hungary when I was younger: if you mention it to me today, I will likely think of the recent elections there instead of the parts of Budapest that I saw. By contrast, if you were to ask me about Alwar, a city in Rajasthan, India that I visited multiple times, I would likely tell you all about going there with my cousins and our “extremely competitive” football games. In your writing, I love your addition of a touch of humor in this blog, as it helped draw me in to your writing. I also liked your anecdotes, because they enhanced the relatable tone you keep throughout your blogs. Thank you for a great piece!

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  2. Acintya ShenoyApril 22, 2026 at 7:00 PM

    Crazily enough, I’ve had a similar experience with a boat fiasco at Lake Chabot. My parents and I had taken a motor-driven boat all the way out to the far end of the lake, with the least signs of human civilization present. After a good 10 minutes, we began to realize that we didn’t really seem to be going anywhere. Soon after it dawned on us that we couldn’t hear the motor anymore. We were stuck in the middle of Lake Chabot with a dead boat. The descriptions on the sides on how to replace the battery for the motor were almost completely torn out, but the engineering degree my dad got in undergrad thankfully helped us (him) successfully replace it and get us back on our way to shore. Years later, we still look back on it and marvel at the nerves of steel we had to pilot that rackety old thing all the way out into the water. But I’m still grateful for that experience, because not only did I get some beautiful views of the hills, but also learned about how to replace a battery in a motorboat. In case I never need to again. ;)

    My experience aside, I find it similar how both of us look back on a very serious experience with a twinge of humor and lightheartedness. It’s easiest to laugh at a dangerous situation when it has already passed.

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  3. Annie ZhuApril 22, 2026 at 9:27 PM

    Thank you for sharing the traumatic story of your Lake Tahoe trip. You seem to have built up an impressive list of Tahoe disasters, and I am curious to know what other unfortunate situations your family has encountered on its beautiful waters/slopes.
    I like how you incorporated suspense into your storytelling, as it kept me very interested while I was reading. Picturing such a horrible experience made me feel anxious, and I wasn’t even the one who experienced it! “We had never put the anchor down” as its own line was an excellent structural choice—it almost felt a bit comical, like those Diary of a Wimpy Kid books where Greg does something stupid that leaves his family stranded on an island for the rest of the story. I hope you guys found something fun to do in those 3 to 4 hours; me personally, I would be sooo bored waiting for patrol!
    I also love that you still look forward to visiting Lake Tahoe in spite of your family’s unlucky history. I applaud you because it demonstrates resilience and bravery on your part.
    Beautiful lake photo, by the way! Did you take it?

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