Windsurfing near Willard Bay State Park
- Bear Lake (81 km)
- Jordanelle State Park (104 km)
- Sulphur Creek (106 km)
- Rush Lake (111 km)
- Deer Creek Reservoir (117 km)
Willard Bay is an excellent windsurfing spot, considering its land-locked, deep interior, Rocky Mountain location north of Salt Lake City, UT. Literally a stone's throw off I-15, with 15 square miles of open fresh water, a very good side-shore launch, and a 3-4-mile reach in the prevailing winds. Get blown away, and you drift into the populated marina side and walk back in minutes. It's power boat heaven, so it's noisy as hell on summer weekends, but when I lived there many years ago, the park rangers protected non-powered water users (that's us!) with an iron fist. I've been rescued by PWC, but never had any problems with them.
Look upwind. All you see is a hundred miles of essentally Bonneville Salt Flats and the Great Salt Lake. With little to disturb the wind, it can be VERY steady for inland waters. Forecasts of 10-20 can produce many hours of very steady 20 from late AM 'til early evening. May and June can produce many days -- sometimes a continuous week -- like that. The whole bay is just 14 feet deep, so it warms up early in the spring, and can get nice thigh-high swell in those conditions. We've also had many days there of wind in the 20s, 30s, even 40s when the isobars REALLY stack up (the 16 solid hours in 1982 or so that never got BELOW 80 mph were a fluke that no one wanted to get caught in). It's all fronts plus thunderstorms -- the latter can sit on the mountains many miles to the west and produce nice wind without a hint of lightning or thunder at the bay.
Is it worth a trip to go there for the windsurfing? HELL, no; it's just fronts, man, and unless it's blowing from the SW, W, NW, or N, it's useless (the 90-mph night was east winds -- dead offshore. But if you're passing through and the trees are moving, stop and play. I've had friends from New Mexico drive right by 40-mph winds on the bay on their way to the Gorge; too bad ... it was the only wind they saw on the whole trip. Watch the forecasts, then watch the conditions, and once the wind direction falls between SW and N, just drive to the north Willard Bay exit on I-15, then drive south past the main marina. The best launch site is (was?) in the bay south of the marina. I doubt kiting is practical there because the wind is almost side-on and the powerboaters wouldn't even realize there was a string connecting that bright buoy-thing to that swimmer.
Willard Bay has camping (Google it), and it's at the northern end of the city of Ogden, just north of Salt Lake City, so it's rural oasis near a city.