Today closes out the East Troy Electric Railroad's regular season. The trolley's printed schedule has run Saturdays from April 18 straight through August 29, and tomorrow the museum shifts into its Harvest Fest lineup, Saturdays and Sundays from September 5 through the end of October. If you wanted a spring-through-summer ride on one of the interurban cars that used to connect East Troy to Milwaukee, today was it.
That kind of precision is the story of most of a Lake Beulah summer. The sailing school runs its regatta on the date it always runs. The farmers market opens the first Friday of June and closes the first Friday of October. The Lions Club sets up the carnival, the fireworks go off Saturday night, and everyone who's lived here more than a season already knows the rhythm without checking a calendar. But one date this year didn't hold. The one decision residents had actually been waiting on, whether Lake Beulah would finally get a wake-boat ordinance, came due in mid-April and the Town of East Troy Board chose not to make it. That non-decision, more than any regatta or ribbon-cutting, is what actually shaped how the lake felt this season.
What ran exactly as planned
The Lake Beulah Sailing School held its 34th Annual Opti Regatta on Monday, June 22, at the Lake Beulah Yacht Club on East Shore Road, drawing Optimist dinghy sailors across the Red-White-Blue and Green Fleet divisions. Five days later, on June 27, the sailing school ran its only annual fundraiser at the same clubhouse: a pontoon-boat tour of four homes around the lake, each one staffed by the builder, remodeler, or agent who could speak to the work done on it, followed by a catered dinner from Toothpicks and the usual auction and games. It's the kind of evening that only makes sense on a small lake where everyone already knows whose dock is whose.
Downtown, the East Troy Lions Club ran its Music Festival Thursday, June 11, through Sunday, June 14, at the Rossmiller Sports Complex, complete with a Badgerland Midways carnival, a parade themed around America's 250th, and fireworks sponsored by the Village of East Troy on Saturday night. Four-day wristbands ran $60 in advance or $75 at the gate, sold in advance at Gus's Drive-In and at three bank branches around town. That advance discount is the kind of detail locals learn once and use every year after.
The farmers market changed address this year. What used to set up at Village Square Park moved to Honey Creek Collective on Townline Road, running Fridays from 3 to 6 p.m., June 5 through October 2. If you drove to Main Street out of habit this spring expecting the same tents in the same spot, you weren't the only one.
Over at the golf course, Lake Beulah Golf Course kept its supper-club rhythm going with fish fry specials, prime rib nights, and Sunday brunch, alongside a driving range and cart fleet that got real upgrades this year. None of this is new exactly, but it's the texture that makes the lake feel occupied rather than just scenic.
The vote that didn't happen
Here's what actually changed the conversation on the water this year. In January, the Lake Beulah Management District voted to recommend a draft ordinance restricting wake-enhanced boating, the kind that uses ballast tanks to build waves for surfing, to two designated zones on opposite sides of the lake, each requiring boats to stay at least 500 feet from shore and in water at least 25 feet deep. The proposal came with real teeth: forfeitures up to $500 for a first violation, $1,000 for a repeat within a year. It went to the Town of East Troy Board for a decision.
That decision followed a year of public pressure most lakes never generate. At the town's annual electors meeting the previous April, residents cast an advisory vote on four options for handling wake surfing on Lake Beulah, and the option that won by a wide margin, 128 votes to 37 for no restriction at all, called for an outright ban. The town board sat on that result through the entire 2025 boating season. When the LBMD's more moderate draft ordinance finally reached the board this spring, the outcome wasn't a ban and it wasn't approval either. At the April 16, 2026 meeting, a motion to table any board action or ordinance implementation on wake surfing until January 2027, pending a review of lake data gathered from the season's changes, passed 4 to 1.
What makes the timing worth noting is what happened one town over. The Town of Troy, which governs Booth Lake just south of Lake Beulah, passed its own wake-enhancement ordinance and put it into effect on April 15, 2026, the day before East Troy's board tabled theirs. Two adjacent townships, two lake districts pushing for the same kind of protection, and only one of them has a rule on the books. It's an easy pair of names to confuse, Town of Troy and Town of East Troy, but they're separate boards making separate calls, and this spring they made opposite ones.
| Lake Beulah (Town of East Troy) | Booth Lake (Town of Troy) | |
|---|---|---|
| Ordinance status as of August 2026 | Drafted and recommended by the lake district, tabled by the town board | Adopted and in effect |
| Effective date | Board action postponed to January 2027 | April 15, 2026 |
| What governs boaters now | Existing town rules only: slow-no-wake Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays from 6 p.m. to 10 a.m., skiing and tubing permitted 10 a.m. to sunset on weekdays and 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on weekends and holidays, one tow rope per boat on weekends | New restriction limiting artificially enhanced wakes for all lakes in Town of Troy jurisdiction |
For a Lake Beulah resident, the practical effect of the tabled vote is that nothing about wake surfing changed this season, and by the board's own timeline nothing will change before next year's boating season starts either. The 812-acre lake's existing rules, the same ones that have applied for years, are still what a water patrol officer would cite if you asked. Tom VanDenBogart, president of Protect Lake Beulah, put the stakes plainly during last year's debate:
"This isn't about banning boats, it's about protecting a lake that many people care about."
Whatever side of that argument a given resident lands on, the practical takeaway is the same: the January 2027 review date is now the thing to watch, not this season's boat traffic.
What that means for the rest of this season
If you're used to hearing wake-surf boats running their surf systems close to shore near the channels, that hasn't stopped and won't until the town board acts. If you were hoping for enforceable 500-foot, 25-foot zones this year, they exist only on paper, recommended by the district but never adopted. The lake's long-standing slow-no-wake window and its skiing hours are still the only rules with any legal weight behind them, and Mill Lake's counterclockwise ski pattern is still the one local quirk worth knowing if you're new to towing anyone.
The lake district's other seasonal work, weed harvesting to keep boat lanes and swimming areas clear, has continued on its usual schedule regardless of the ordinance debate. That's the kind of maintenance that happens every year whether or not the bigger political question gets resolved.
Heading into fall
Labor Day is close, and the calendar shifts accordingly. The Honey Creek Collective farmers market runs through October 2, so there are still a handful of Fridays left to catch it before it closes for the season. The East Troy Electric Railroad's Harvest Fest trains pick up September 5 and run weekends through the end of October, a different kind of ride than the summer schedule but the same depot and the same volunteers running it.
None of that is new information if you've lived here a while. What's worth carrying into next year is the date that actually matters: January 2027, when the Town of East Troy Board says it will look at this season's lake data and decide, finally, whether Lake Beulah gets the ordinance its own management district already recommended.
If you've been thinking about your own place on this lake, whether that means a change, a project, or just a conversation about what your corner of the shoreline is worth, Linda Tongé has spent more than fifty years around Geneva Lake and its neighboring waters, including Lake Beulah, and is glad to talk it through. Schedule a consultation whenever you're ready.
