Lake Don Pedro Marina

If I could give zero stars for the customer service here I would. SO terrible that I will NEVER be launching my boat here again. For the past 22 years I’ve spent my summers on Melones. Which I will be continuing for now on, only came to pedro due to the drought. MISTAKE. We came in on Thursday Sept 3^rd to get a slip for the weekend rather than launching every day. We were pretty sure we were going to pull our boat out Sunday evening instead of Monday, guy named Austin was working and told us «If your not sure when your leaving it would be best to just pay through Monday, and if you do leave Sunday it would be no problem giving your money back for Monday.» We thought that was great and went ahead and did it.
Sunday came and we were taking the boat out to come home, went into the marina to get our money back for Monday and the worker was a COMPLETE A**hole, talked to us like we were scum. His words were (raising his voice) «I TOLD YOU… THAT WE HAVE NO REFUNDS! I COULD HAVE RENTED THIS SLIP OUT TO SOMEONE ELSE SO YOUR PAYING FOR MONDAY!» and he went on and on being a dick.
He wasn’t even the same guy, so he didn’t «tell us» anything lol. The guy we payed was Austin. This guy was off the handle.
So all in all that was a $ 20 waist. And we will just wait out the drought and put our money into Melones =) As I suggest you should to!

Many of the reviews here offer unreasonable complaints. I have rented houseboats on Shasta, New Melones, and Don Pedro, and always come back here. The lake is beautiful, and the marina has nice big boats with waterslides and hot tubs on top. A few points for those complaining:
1) Boating is expensive. Boats break often, require expensive parts for repairs, and eat a ton of gas. There is no way around this. The rates at Don Pedro Marina are medium low market rates. If they are too high for you, find another hobby.
2) Rental boats get trashed. It is hard for me to keep my crew from trashing the boat, and we’ve been going for 8 years. If you want a mint condition boat, then buy one and bring it.
3) Rental boats break. Especially the bathroom plumbing in them. In about 30 times of chartering boats, the plumbing has broken or already been broken about ¹⁄₃ of the time. If you’re on a freshwater lake, don’t take a shower. Use the head as sparingly as possible, and with minimal toilet paper. If you cannot handle these restrictions, then camp.
4) Yes, the service at the marina is slow and the workers could at times be more competent. This is a seasonal job, nobody is getting rich off of you, and you are on vacation. Relax, be patient, try to enjoy the lake, and plan on using the marina services as little as possible the next time you come.
If you are used to the vagaries of boating and marina life, then don pedro is an awesome place.

DONT waste you time renting a ski boat here, the boats are trashed! throttle response was poop! Very hard to pull up a single skier. inside was ripped and torn the speedometer didn’t work and it kept slowing down by itself! $ 450 for a one day rental with gas. should have taken that and used it toward buying a boa. t Never again!

This review is for the houseboat rental
The houseboats that they offer for rent are really nice but they don’t maintain them well enough to justify the price.
We leave the dock with about 10 people friday morning and enjoy the boat. Around 9pm we start taking showers and notice that the water isn’t draining. A few minutes later, the toilet wasn’t flushing! It’s too late to have it serviced at the marina so we wait until the morning to have to drive back to the marina to get it fixed; all night with no bathroom to use! When we arrived they say we filled up the septic tank and thats why it wasn’t draining. The maintenance guy comes out of the bathroom and says its okay now. Luckily we checked the bathroom before we left the marina and there’s still poop in the toilet, so the worker comes back to try to flush it and it turns out that the toilet was still broken. They had to take the toilet out and we wasted about two hours at the marina for repairs. We used up gas going back to the marina for repairs and back to our island. Gas for the whole weekend ended up being 879.00 dollars.
After we witnessed them empty our septic tank saturday morning, we had no issues of it getting close to full by our check out time on sunday and we had around 15 people on the houseboat for the last two days. This must mean that they didn’t empty the septic tank from when we first left the dock on friday. Septic tanks are supposed to last our whole 3 days and 2 nights, especially because we took all the precautions of not using unnecessary water. To add to that, our clean water tank wasn’t even half empty. so why would our dirty tank be full? Very inconvenient.
The most dangerous part of this boat were the generators. They kept failing and the worker actually showed us how to go to the back compartments with all these wires to fix it. I don’t think any customer should have to reach in the back compartments to fix the houseboat they spent a lot of money to have a nice vacation on. Flipping a switch on the main board is fine, but putting your hands in between wires is very dangerous.
When we did manually shut down the generators at night. the back up battery didn’t last the 5 hours they told us it would. So I would wake up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom and the lights wouldn’t turn on.
The right engine would always have a problem starting up which is another safety hazard and I am just very disappointed at all of the problems we had worry about. We rented the smaller houseboat a couple of years ago and I don’t remember having so much trouble.
The worst part is, we rented the 70′ remodeled silver this time and spent more money. dont get me wrong the tables and counter were nice and shiny and it was big and roomy
.but the flat screen wasn’t updated with no usb ports. The top deck tv was missing a remote so the workers just had to take the protective screen off and told us to just manually change the channel. And I know it sounds silly to complain about the little stuff but when you’re spending money to have a nice vacay on the top boat at the marina you shouldn’t have to encounter all of these small or big problems.
All in all, you are spending about 1300.00 a day plus gas on a vacation and all these things keep breaking down on you or don’t work and you’ve gotta worry about these things when you shouldn’t be. It isn’t worth the price. If you do go, jump off the top rail into the water, fun stuff. I also left a couple lines in the water with night crawlers and caught 3 cat fish!

Had lunch at the café everyone had a bad attitude like they didn’t want to be there. Charged $.75 for ranch but when one of the locals asked for one it was free. I can’t stand the local only attitudes if wasn’t for the tourists from the valley there would be no marina. Btw the food was snack bar quality for fine dining pricing.

Rented a jet ski here from Forever Resorts. The staff is super friendly and helpful and I feel like we got our monies worth. We rented the jet ski for the entire day (8am-​4pm). I suggest you get there early because there was a line and you have to watch a 6 minute video, which all together took about 30 mins from our time on the water. The jet skis are in good condition but cosmetically can use some work. The seats on a lot of them were tearing apart but we got lucky with a good lookin ski. No problems on the lake, make sure you fill up at about half your day so you wont have to wasted anymore time. For a full 8 hours of riding took about $ 90 to fill up the tank.

The lake was nice, but the boat rental ridiculously priced!
We rented a 26′ boat for a half day for $ 195. I didn’t expect to pay $ 86 for gas and $ 17 oil. We just drove out into the lake and swam in the water. The fuel gauge was still beyond full when we returned it, but the attendant said that we used 11 gallons of gas. NO WAY! Something is fishy here. The $ 395 deposit was charged to my CC up front. and refunded when we returned the boat.

If you wanna party, this is a good lake to come to. If you wanna wakeboard, not a good lake for it — super choppy.
Obviously I wanted to party. It was a holiday weekend & there were boats everywhere hidden in coves. The spot I went to was near a waterfall. Many boats were tied up together, loud music, beer bongs, house boats with slides, dancing, even a floating restroom.
The water was crystal clear, the sun was shining, there were many launch lanes (atleast 5), and people were friendly.
What more could i ask for? :)

Riiiiidicilous!
My God. I didn’t realize that it was going to take 15 minutes to wait in line for a damn shirt. There was one person in front of me and the lady took Fooooooor ever being the cashier. When we got there, there wasn’t anyone else in the store. Someone in our party ordered 3 breakfast burritos… We waited a half hour.
There was only one lady (who was the slow cashier) in there. She started the burritos, then helped ring someone up, then as she was ringing me up, another lady came in from outside smoking a cigarette and apparently didn’t wash her hands before making them. Finally getting rang out, the burritos are finally done. The line is now forming. We go to the boat… WTF? only 2 burritos? All that wait for 2 freakin burritos. We go back inside… the lady confirms with the cashier, yes, it should have been 3.
When we say, we don’t have time to wait… we will just take our money back… the cashier says, well its going to take longer to get your money back than for you to get your burrito?!? WOW. Really?! So we waited for the last burrito and sure enough, it took a shorter time to make the burrito than for the cashier to ring everyone.
What a fun and exciting experience!

Launched a boat at Moccasin they allowed too many vehicles in, no parking. Had to park 1mile away. The roads were marked, but it looked like a high school kid did the marking, very confusing. The one good thing was that a ranger was ticketing the idiots who parked single vehicles in the tow vehicle area. water was nice 81 to 83 degrees.

Lake Don Pedro is one of my favorite places to spend a day on the water. It’s big — really big — with lots of little fingers to explore. Perfect for boaters and jet skiers alike. Bonus that they have floating porto potties!
The Marina is basic with all you need for a complete day of boating — gas and beer. Okay, there’s some food and sunglasses and suntan lotion, but they also have gas and beer. Jet skiers have an easy time gassing up at this lake because they have nifty little slips to perch your ride onto. No teetering, no bouncing with the waves as the boats troll by and and no worrying about gas spewing into the fresh, clean water.
The staff is efficient, but not overly friendly. In fact, they have an attitude, but thankfully so. That attitude is to keep the lake safe and clean. They are diligent about folks using bibs on their gas tanks so as not to spill a drop of gas into the water. I love that! Wish that happened in Seal Slough or the SF Bay.
One of the big draws at Don Pedro are the houseboats. They rent them, sell them and house them. Slips are a bit expensive — actually really expensive. If you buy a houseboat here, make sure the slip is included, otherwise you may have to take the boat out of the water and move it to another lake. Not an easy feat. If you want to rent a houseboat, there are plenty at the lake. Rental prices run from $ 471 to around $ 1200 per day in the winter, and can get pretty expensive in the summer. Book ahead and gather 20 of your closest friends to split the cost with you and it’ll be a vacation you’ll never forget.
TIP: Not the greatest lake Marina around, but they do take credit cards so you don’t need to worry about soggy cash.

WHAT A NIGHTMARE!
We were so disappointed with Lake Don Pedro Marina!!! We reserved a wake board and a boat with a wake tower. They didn’t have the wakeboard we reserved and they gave us a boat without a wake tower. They couldn’t do anything about not having the wakeboard we reserved, but were at least able to get us into a boat with a tower.
The boat was FILTHY! By filthy, I mean covered in dirt and cob webs! The interior was so sun damaged that pieces of it were flaking off the seats. All but one of the speakers were broken in the boat. It was disgusting. We wasted an hour of our morning trying to get things straight when we should have been on the glassy water! Two thumbs down for Lake Don Pedro Marina!