Maddog Tales

Jump to Comments Hi, welcome to my life. This blog is helping me write the stories of my life and I hope you enjoy reading them. I also encourage you to leave comments or your own stories to share with us.

This week I am exploring my water skiing memories from Darwin to Malaysia.

We turned off the main road onto I will grudgingly call a local farm track and headed towards the river. Behind us the trailer bounced and wriggled through the ruts and bumps, threatening to flip the boat off if we moved too quickly. The local farmers looked up from their labours and gawked at the mad Australians motoring through past their paddy fields. We pressed on and found a gently sloping embankment from where we could launch and retrieve the boat without risking life and limb. The river flowed slowly through the green fields, a red-brown ribbon that hid everything beneath its calm surface. Before we started skiing, a slow reconnaissance over the river revealed no obvious logs, rocks, sunken treasure ships or other manner of obstacles. We could cut loose at full throttle and tear up the water.

I learnt to ski on Lake Bennett south of Darwin, not a massive body of water but much less confining than the river bends of Northern Malaysia where our boat sat idling that day. My first time out at Bennett’s must have looked comical from the shore. As the boat pulled my skis onto the surface, I tried to stand upright on them. My instructor, Pud, had other ideas and grabbed the back of life vest to force me back into a crouch. Once I appeared balanced over the skis, he slowly guided me upright, released his grip and I pulled on the ski rope precipitating a backwards fall into the water.

Waterskiing is a strange mix of sensations, the boat pulls the rope taunt then starts to drag the skier throught the water before accelerating to get your skis on the plane. The skier leans back against the pull or gets pulled over the skis and dragged under the water like a large live bait. The 350cubic inch V8 motor in the boat roars as it accelerates and you literally pop out of the water. My first reaction, like most first timers, drew the ski rope above my head and over I went into the boat wash. The boat circled back, laying the rope across me to have another go, and so it went around the lake. A two minute run for most skiers took nearly 15 minutes for a novice whose natural state is mild panic at best. The last fall occurred just off the launching beach and I was left to struggle in with the skis while another skier headed off.

From an in auspious start, I slowly built my confidence taking the first tentative moves out of the boat’s wake into clean water and after a couple of weeks starting ripping from left to right and back again for a complete lap of the lake. Time to try a slalom ski.

Before heading into the water, tradition holds that an old hand pushes the soon-to-be single ski novice from behind unexpectly. The foot the goes forward to stop your fall is the front foot on your slalom ski. Despite a right-footed upbringing, I came through as a goofy-footer and headed into the lake.

More water skiing stories all this week.

Tags: darwin, malaysia, Memoir, memories, waterskiing