"Dylan Smith" wrote in message
...

If it was dead calm, yes - but when your eyes are perhaps 4 inches above
the water in the trough of a 3-foot wave, and perhaps a couple of inches
below the water at the crest of the 3 foot wave, and the city lights are
6 miles away, there's a good chance you'll never even see them.


How high would a light have to be to be visible from the lake surface? If
he swam towards shore he'd have been swimming toward an antenna farm, some
of those towers are over 1200 AGL. City lights also tend to illuminate the
bottoms of clouds and produce a glow from particulates in the air.