August 6 Miss Crustacean USA Beauty Pageant and Ocean City Creep Ocean City, New Jersey Beauty pageant for hermit crabs; this year's hopefuls try to win the coveted crown from the reigning champ, "Copa Crabana." 609-525-9300. August 8 Surfing Walk of Fame Huntington Beach California Six athletes are inducted on the pavement in front of Jack's Surfboards, the Hollywood Walk of Fame of the surfing world. 714-375-2188. August 8-9 Long Beach Island Lifeguard Tournament Barnegat Light, New Jersey Long Beach Island lifeguards compete in surf rescues and other events. 609-361-1200. August 8-10 Tetonkaha Rendezvous Bruce, South Dakota Blindfolded canoeists cross Tetonkaha Lake, while their partners in the bow bark out commands; if they reach shore, they switch and head back. 605-693-4589. August 9 Hawaii State Windsurf Championships Kanaha Beach Park, Maui Professionals and amateurs, male and female, square off. 808-877-2111. August 9 Hawaii State Windsurf Championships Kanaha Beach Park, Maui Professionals and amateurs, male and female, square off. 808-877-2111. MORE

I'm a lake lover of four decades, and I have never seen anything like it. Laguna Miramar ("sea view"), as it is called in Spanish, lies in a ring of mountains 47 miles southeast of Ocosingo, in the southern state of Chiapas, the heart of the Lacandn rainforest and the Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve. It is also the Zapatista heartland, one reason Miramar may not be for everybody. Access is through the Maya community of Emiliano Zapata, where you are already "back there," so to speak. Then it's a four-and-a-half-mile hike to the lake.

The trail ends at a long, narrow beach. There, beneath chicozapote trees bristling with orchids, bromeliads, and epiphytic cacti, the community has erected two thatched, open-sided palapas, one for tents or hammocks and one with a traditional raised hearth for cooking. Zapata and the other lake communities bar hunting and logging near Miramar, so the only sounds are "lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore," in Yeats's words, and the unceasing drone of howler monkeys.

I visited Laguna Miramar with Fernando Ochoa, a bilingual outfitter from San Cristbal who helped Zapata develop its tourism plan. We paddled the lake's more than seven square miles for three long days and didn't see it all, though we did visit pictographs, rock carvings, and a full-scale island ruin left behind by Miramar's ancient inhabitants, ancestors of the Maya who live there now. A thousand feet deep, Miramar sustains enough aquatic life to entertain a Cousteau, including turtles, crocs, and a cryptozoological creature the Indians say resembles a manatee. In our canoe cruising, however, all we saw were several dozen species of tropical and migratory birds, a bewildering array of plant life, and fish. Mostly we swam.

And the swimming was the best I've ever had, anywhere. The few divers who have sampled Miramar's depths can get downright poetic about it. We paddled from one travertine shoal to the next, diving into water the color and clarity of Aqua Velva and basking in shallow depressions eroded along the shore. Once in a while we saw a single dugout in the distance. The rest was silence.