This pristine Charlotte-area waterway is part of Lake Norman. No, it’s not. Yes, it is.
Is Lake Davidson really a lake?
Or is it part of Lake Norman, the largest human-made lake in North Carolina?
On Sunday, July 23, I kayaked Lake Davidson’s pristine waters with Davidson resident Pat Jenkins to see for myself. Radar warned of storms, but only a brief pitter-patter of rain materialized before the afternoon turned all sunshine.
Jenkins and his wife, Jan, have lived in Davidson since 1994, including the past six years on Lake Davidson in the Davidson Pointe community.
He’s also great friends with one of my older brothers from their long-ago days as young lawyers at a firm in Providence, Rhode Island, the state where I grew up.
To drivers on northbound Interstate 77, Lake Davidson is the serene, nearly boat-free water to the right of the I-77 causeway just north of Davidson exit 30. To the left is choppier Lake Norman.
Traffic crawls on the causeway each summer as drivers slow to scan for boats and gawk at who’s on them on the Lake Norman side, but that’s a story for another day.
For months, I’d looked forward to this kayaking expedition that Jenkins invited me on after I wrote about an Alabama developer’s plans for a massive waterfront development on Lake Davidson.
Lake Davidson or Lake Norman?
In its rezoning request with the town of Mooresville, Birmingham developer LIV Development said its 96.8-acre community would provide rare public access to Lake Norman.
Lake Davidson residents protested the rezoning at public hearings, saying the development along Transco Road in southern Iredell County would ruin their peaceful setting. The community would be on their lake, not Lake Norman, they correctly noted.
Lake Davidson is 341 acres and straddles the Mecklenburg-Iredell county line along the I-77 corridor.
Mooresville approved the rezoning in April, after plans progressed for an east-west connector road to which the new development will connect.
The LIV Development community will include 353 multifamily units, 136 town homes, 90 duplexes, a waterfront restaurant and a public multi-use shoreline greenway offering public access to the lake.
Lake Davidson, that is. Which I didn’t believe existed.
Jenkins hoped I’d appreciate the stark contrasts between his lake and Lake Norman by kayaking with him. It took fewer than 10 seconds into our several-hour journey to see how calm Lake Davidson is compared with Lake Norman and its 32,475 acres.
Err, the Lake Davidson part of Lake Norman, I should say.
It’s Lake Norman. Are you for real?
A little over a week before Jenkins and I kayaked, Duke Energy spokesperson Ellen Morton told me that Lake Davidson is a part of Lake Norman.
“They are connected by a couple of culverts under the I-77 causeway,” Morton said in an email. “Duke Energy manages Lake Davidson alongside Lake Norman.”
As we kayaked, however, Jenkins and I encountered far more wildlife than humans on Lake Davidson, including heron and a gaggle of geese on the water, and a bald eagle and hawks in the sky.
We saw one powerboat and a couple of Jet Skiers and a couple of stand-up paddlers.
Jenkins, who is retired from his legal career, offered more than a few wisecracks about Lake Davidson being a part of Lake Norman. I could see why he and my brother, the family comedian, got along so well.
“Look at that water raging into the tunnel from Lake Davidson to Lake Norman!” he blurted as we neared the tunnel-like culvert connecting the lakes.
The depth of the water fell to waist-high in the narrow channel that leads to the tunnel, and to a mere 3 inches deep in the tunnel.
The culvert is the only visible one between the lakes, and it’s directly beneath I-77. When you’re in the channel on a kayak, the traffic sounds like a screeching, ceaseless, haunting wind across the prairies.
Entering the shallow channel was like coming upon the Amazon jungle, I told Jenkins. A tree canopy drapes the channel, and the temperature seemed to cool by several degrees.
We had to maneuver our kayaks through water depths that eventually fell to only inches deep. Jenkins left his kayak and measured the depth with his fingers. He then walked into the tunnel to the Lake Norman side and back.
“Clop, clop, clop,” sounded each of his steps in the tunnel.
“This is the sophisticated waterway connecting Lake Davidson to Lake Norman,” Jenkins said rather wryly before laughing. “Oh wait a minute, are they the same lake? I call it a ditch.
“Isn’t it true that our kayaks were grounded two or three times going back in there? We scraped bottom, got hung up on a board. I’d say the water’s no deeper than 3 or 4 inches before you get way back in there.”
“There really isn’t any significant water interchange between the lakes,” he continued. “There’s certainly no current here, right?”
“There’s literally almost no flow here in either direction,” Jenkins said as he later stood near the tunnel entrance. “I saw some leaves going by me from Lake Davidson to Lake Norman very slowly. You can see the water is stagnant right here. There’s no real flow.”
Is Lake Davidson fed by springs? Nope.
Evidence of small springs exists in the pond at Roosevelt Wilson Park in Davidson, according to the town’s decades-old Lake Davidson Fact Sheet.
However, “if Lake Davidson is fed by springs, the effect is minimal, and negated by evaporation,” according to the document.
If springs played a greater role, Lake Davidson would “rise constantly, and water would run through the causeway to Lake Norman,” officials say in the Fact Sheet.
The Fact Sheet calls Lake Davidson “a relatively closed system with little exchange of water with Lake Norman,” although the document at the same time acknowledges that Lake Davidson is part of Lake Norman.
The I-77 culvert was built high to handle overflow between the lakes, town officials say in the Fact Sheet.
The Fact Sheet further explains that Duke Energy controls the levels of all of the lakes it manages along the Catawba River, including Lake Norman, Lake Davidson and tinier (125-acre) Lake Cornelius to the south of Lake Davidson.
Suffice it to say, no matter the levels, Lake Davidson is a part of Lake Norman, Duke Energy says.
Lake Davidson special restrictions
Still, Jenkins said, a different reality sets in when you kayak his home lake.
“We moved to Davidson Pointe because we wanted to be on this lake,” he said when we stopped at an outcropping of rocks. There, someone erected a flag pole with a U.S. flag that flapped in the breeze that Sunday.
“We like to take walks along the trail along the lake,” he said. “It’s just very bucolic, to us, anyway.”
The town of Davidson enacted restrictions over the decades to ensure Lake Davidson would, in fact, be a more peaceful lake.
From the first residential developments it approved on the Lake Davidson shore, the Davidson Town Board implemented a “limited power-boating” vision for the lake, according to the Lake Davidson Fact Sheet.
Starting with the Spinnaker Cove community in 1980, the size of boat motors was regulated through town zoning. Every town board since has banned boat motors greater than 10 horsepower at new subdivision docks.
The horsepower limitation was written into a section of the Davidson Planning Ordinance that was approved in 2001.
No individual docks are allowed on the lake, only community boat slips.
New development along Lake Davidson also must keep 100% of the shoreline for public use, per town ordinance. That means either for the exclusive use of residents of the new development or dedicated to the town for general public use.
“It cannot be individually-owned private property,” according to the Lake Davidson Fact Sheet.
The lake has only one public power-boat launch area, at the end of Transco Road where Mooresville has zoning say.
“It was not built as a boat ramp,” according to the Fact Sheet. “Most likely, it was an existing road that was flooded when Lake Norman was created. Most of the power boats that use the lake or are docked on the lake acquired access through Transco Road.”
Davidson, meanwhile, added a 100-foot Lake Davidson shoreline buffer requirement in 2001.
All of which is to say, part of Lake Norman or not, Pat Jenkins would never trade his setting for one across the I-77 causeway.
“It’s nothing like Lake Norman on the other side of that causeway, where you have all kinds of boat traffic, Jet Skis and everything,” he said. “We have a little bit of that, but not much. ... It’s really not crowded, and that’s one of the things we love about it.”
So, is Lake Davidson really a separate lake? I say it depends on how you look at it.
This story was originally published August 2, 2023 at 11:34 AM.