Copied from a post by Owtlaw:

Technically speaking, there is no "wrong" side of the lake, although the natural tendency on Travis to treat the lake as a big highway and imagine a yellow line down the middle does make it safer..... as long as everyone does that!

Boats passing from in a head on manner should deflect to starboard if needed so they pass port side to port side.  At night, you should be looking at each other's red nav lights.  Our mile markers are navigational buoys, and should be navigated keeping the red buoys on the starboard of your boat and green on the port when going upstream, or into harbors.  Downstream and outbound from harbor is opposite of course. ("Red on right returning" is the memory trick on that)  When navigating the channel correctly, boats going in either direction will actually be on the same sides of each buoy, so refer back to the port-to-port thingy. Wink

Actual maritime law has no concept of right of way.  Each captain is responsible for avoiding collision, but there are rules regarding the "stand on" and "give way" vessel, sometimes referred to as privileged and burdened vessels.  The full rules, which you'll hear referred to as colregs are here:

http://www.navcen.uscg.gov/mwv/navrules/download.htm

There is a nice summary, and probably most everything we need to know here:

http://boatsafe.com/nauticalknowhow/122098tip.htm

It would be a much safer lake if everyone was aware of the colregs, instead of just 5% of whoever is out any given weekend.