A cove at Lake Berryessa, during the 4th of July holiday weekend, Saturday, July 3, 2021 in Napa, Calif.
To many swimmers, the waters of Lake Berryessa — which has claimed at least 335 lives since 1957 — are as tantalizing as they are treacherous.
The blue-green Napa County reservoir stretches from one cove to another like a rumpled tarmac, flecked with islands and inlets that may seem just within reach to someone standing on the shoreline.
That’s what makes it deadly, said Henry Wofford, spokesperson for the Napa County Sheriff’s Office.
“A lot of people see a small island and think, ‘Oh, I can easily swim across to the shore over there,’” Wofford said.
“But what appears to be a short, easy swim can be a very challenging swim in Lake Berryessa. You can’t judge it the way you judge a swimming pool.”
Of more than 300 drowning victims since August 24, 1957, roughly half have been swimmers, though others jumped from rocks, let go of life preservers, stumbled into deep water while wading or succumbed after their boats capsized, according to figures reviewed by The Chronicle. Children have wandered away from their parents and disappeared. Motorists have lost control of cars and plunged into the lake’s murky depths.
Since the beginning of 2020, 11 people have died at Berryessa, the most recent a 16 year-old baseball star from Fairfield, who drowned on June 27. This string of fatalities occurred despite closures due to COVID-19 and the lightning complex fires of 2020, and temporary boat ramp shutdowns last year because the drought has lowered water levels.
“It’s a dangerous lake,” said Napa County Sheriff Lt. Jon Thompson, who runs the marine station at Berryessa. He said the lake’s appearance is deceptive: Beneath the water’s surface is a rugged, sloped terrain with steep drop-offs, replicating the mountain ridges above. Drought and shifting weather patterns may expose people to more risk, he suggested. As the water level recedes, islands are popping up to tempt swimmers, Thompson noted. Moreover, the extremely hot days make people more fatigued, and increase the threat of drowning.
Thompson was at the scene on June 27, when deputies received a 911 call about the baseball star, later identified by his coaches as Demetrio Nathaniel Perriatt, who had slipped into the water at the lake’s Oak Shores area.
Perriatt and a female companion had brought two rafts, and were enjoying a bit of respite on a day when few people were at the beach, Thompson recalled. As the wind picked up that afternoon, it blew one of the rafts into the reservoir. Perriatt set off to retrieve it on the other raft, but he fell off at some point and began struggling. When sheriff deputies and paramedics arrived shortly after 1 p.m., they could no longer see a figure on the water’s surface.
“We began search efforts that turned into recovery efforts,” Wofford said, describing how the office sent out its dive team and a remotely operated vehicle to comb the area all afternoon and into the night. It took until noon the following day for the machine to locate the boy’s body, about 30 yards away from the shore in water that was 21 feet deep.
“Drownings aren’t like something you see in the movies where it’s this frantic person screaming,” Thompson said. “Drownings happen super fast. You turn around, you see a person, and the next thing you know they’re under water.”
While Perriatt’s death was this year’s first drowning at the lake, it was not the first disaster. Roughly a week earlier, his team had rescued a pregnant woman whose leg was sliced by the propeller of a rented boat. The incident had occurred in a remote area of the lake, and the 911 call kept dropping while law enforcement and medics looked for the vessel, Thompson said.
When deputies found the injured woman they applied a tourniquet to her severed femoral artery, boarded onto a rescue boat and transported her to a California Highway Patrol helicopter. They managed to save the woman and her baby, Thompson said, though the woman’s leg had to be amputated.
As summer wears on, Napa County sheriff deputies and paramedics are bracing for more crises at a lake whose serene beauty belies its grim history. Formed in 1957 when work crews built the Monticello Dam across Putah Creek, Berryessa had a lethal allure almost from the beginning, when the first victim drowned that August.
In 1965 a woman brought her five sons to Berryessa, intending to teach them to swim; she and three of the boys wound up drowning near the North End Trail. Five years later, a toddler fell in the water and drowned while his father loaded picnic supplies into a boat. Others died over the years by jumping off houseboats or trying to swim while intoxicated. In addition to the 329 documented drowning victims, several people died of other means, such as heart failure or hurtling from a rocky cliff. Authorities uncovered a woman’s remains at a campsite in 2019.
On June 27, 2021, 25 year-old Marcos Salvador drowned while trying to swim across the cove at Oak Shores, close to where Perriatt went under water exactly a year later. The uncanny circumstances of their deaths show how quickly a stiff wind, swift current and steep underwater terrain can overwhelm people, even in a popular tourist spot. Every swimmer should wear a life jacket, Thompson said, regardless of how experienced they believe they are.
Perriatt, a skilled outfielder, had just wrapped up a two-week tournament in Oregon with his elite American Legion baseball team, the Fairfield Expos. Like his teammates, he was a promising athlete angling for college scholarships, his coach Ray Canavesio said, serving both on the Expos and the varsity squad at Rodriguez High School in Cordelia.
“He was a great, wonderful kid,” Canavesio told the Chronicle. “I’m stunned.”
Rachel Swan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: rswan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @rachelswan
Rachel Swan is a breaking news and enterprise reporter. She joined the Chronicle in 2015 after stints at several alt weekly newspapers. Born in Berkeley, she graduated from Cal with a degree in rhetoric and is now raising two daughters in El Cerrito.