Water Skiing

Well, my humble little blog about water skiing has officially gone world wide. One of the organizers of the recent world record for number of skiers behind one boat has thanked me for the coverage of their many attempts and finally of their record.

David Bennett, one of the organizers of the event grew up in a family without a boat, but his family did join a local family based ski club and learned to ski and now will ski on just about anything… trampolines (on skis), ladders, milk crates on disks, bench seats and even computer keyboards and laptops. He’s taught nearly 1000 people how to ski.

For those of you that have built the show ski pyramids in the states, here’s something you may find interesting, They used an awful lot of ropes for that record…

That be a whole lot of ropes that they had to get the same length. Put that together with the engineering to devise something to pull that many people from a deep water start and you have quite the record.

The combination of 1 boat, 114 people and 1 nautical mile equals a world record and the Aussies down in Tasmania final set their world record on March 29th.

Here’s a video from a local TV station:

More more details on their accomplishment, take a look at their website.

Over in Tasmania, they are still trying to break the record for most skiers behind a boat. On January 30, 2010, they managed to get 110 skiers (of 120) up on plane from a deep water start, but only 99 skiers made it the nautical mile required for it to be a record.

They plan to try again and soon. Be sure to check out their website for more details, pictures and videos.

Two minutes and 21 seconds that changed television history…

So I know a lot of people have heard the tale of the water skiing elephant. I think Rykert and his dog Nola or the keyboardists over at the CRB mentioned the impressive pachyderm at some point, but I’ve actually managed to have my automated Google-bots track down the source of this legen- wait for it, and I hope you’re not lactose-intolerant because the second half of this word is -dary story.

The Horsehead Water Ski Club in Strahan, Tasmania is going to try and break the world record for number of water skiers behind one boat again. The attempt is set for January 30, 2010. They’ve been trying the last couple of years, but have encountered some engineering difficulties that prevented them from succeeding.

The current record is 100 skiers from Oct 18, 1986. Here’s the picture of everyone up on skis…

Who knew that hangovers + nudity + waterskiing + near hypothermia = community event to boost business. Yeah, that’s right, it’s a community event to boost the communities business. They first tried the Bun Run (that’s what they call it on) out on New Year’s Eve, but that didn’t work so well (put a dent in the supper business), so now they do it on New Year’s Day and it’s been working well for 30 years now. Granted it’s happening in California, so the water is a “balmy” 46 degrees, but that’s still cold.

There are some show skiers from the USA over in China right now and depending on who does the estimates, they are getting  between 40,000 & 50,000+ spectators for practices. Here’s a picture of the crowd.

Here’s are some of my favorite pictures from the 2008 ski season.

2008.12.31 – Favorite Pictures of 2008