Since I've been writing this blog, I've started looking up random stuff, and watching way more action sports videos. This has definitely helped the usually lame YouTube algorithm pull up some interesting stuff. This one totally surprised me.
While I lived on a lake in Ohio for 2 1/2 years as a kid, wakeboarding hadn't been invented yet. The Wetbike had just been invented, but it was another 7 years before the original, stand-up Jet Ski came out, and several more years until PWC's really evolved. Waterskiing and tubing were popular at the time I lived on the lake. Tubing, as in getting pulled on an inner tube behind a boat. But my family didn't have a boat, and we lived at the very end of the lake, where a creek flowed into it. So most of my lake life was swimming at the lodge, and fishing without catching much other than average sized bluegill and crappie.
That said, my friend Robert found the little pool below the spillway, which nobody ever bothered to hike down to. The small, 30 foot long, 10 foot wide pond had a few big bass, and a bluegill that broke my rod and then got away. We made several trips to fish there when we were about 12. One day there was a fair amount of water flowing through the square hole in the center of the 50 foot high spillway ramp. Since there was usually a little water flowing, there was a big trail of algae below the hole, which made the rough concrete slippery. Robert got the idea of trying to hit it as a waterslide. Much to our surprise, it worked.
We hiked up the side of the steep spillway ramp, ran sideways across it, towards the water flowing from the hole, and landed on our hip in the middle of it, then slid 20 or 30 vertical feet down the ramp. We splashed into the two foot deep, big, rectangle pool, full of big carp. A tiny bit of water flowed out of that concrete pool, through some big rocks, then into the smaller pool below, where the big bass and bluegill lived. We hit the improvised redneck waterslide so many times that we both wore through the back pocket and most of our Toughskins jeans underneath. The concrete under the algae was rough, and the last couple of slides nearly took a little skin. Robert and I had a blast.
Needless to say, we also both got our asses tanned for ruining our jeans, when we got home. But it was worth it. So, crazy as it sounds, I have a bit of experience at spillway sliding. But the guys in this video take it to an entirely insane level. I've seen the in-lake ramps, walls, and rails in wakeboarding videos before, as well as cable pull wakeboarding. But I've never seen anything like this. Street wakeboarding, or pretty close to it. The progression continues. This is nuts, don't try it. But it's cool to watch. Another example of how action sports people look at the world completely differently than average people. Then comes the crazy idea, "Hey, you think we could jump that?"
