Maddog Tales

Learning to use a slalom ski seems like starting again, your balance is not as natural and feels like walking across a narrow beam. I wobbled around the lake for a few days until I found my sweet spot, and began to develop my slalom technique. Slalom involves a series of linked sharp turns that requires the skier to be constantly riding the edge of the ski. It is fast, aerobic and requires surprising amounts of upper body strength to muscle your change of direction as quick as possible.

Confident on a slalom ski, I moved on to include the various tricks that made a weekend of skiing interesting. A freeboard, a single ski with no bindings, is used to teach barefooting, so becoming used to its use is a natural progression for most club members. To develop my confidence, I rode a freeboard in the traditional way but also with the fin facing forward and upside down.

Both are remarkable stable conditions for a ski but once I emerged from an off to find the tip of the ski snapped off. I never rode one upside down again. The ultimate freeboard is a fence pailing, skiing a stick looks impressive to a novice but the real trick is to lock your knees together. This technique lowers your balance and helps stability as the boat pulls you up onto the plane.

All this fun focussed me on the next challenge, barefooting, the fastest and hardest form we practiced out on Lake Bennett. With the freeboard mastered, I started the first tentative steps to my barefoot future. The boat accelerated to about 34 knots as I moved into the sweet spot of the boat wake. A good ski boat creates a flat wake with a gentle curve formed at the edge that is great for barefoot skiing.

At 34 knots I lifted my rear foot off the board and poked it into the gentle boat wash. The water rushed across the soul of my foot and I felt the water surface as an edge against my skin. An edge so sharp that I thought it could cut my foot open. I transferred my weight slowly to the barefoot, lifted my other foot and stabbed it into the water. My foot tucked under the surface and I fell face first into the water.

At 34 knots, the water rushes into every cavity as your face impacts the surface and you tumble to a halt. The pattern is repeated until pain forces me to learn the correct way to get that other foot into the water, and then I’m skimming across the lake without skis for the first time.

Tags: australia, barefooting, darwin, lake bennett, Memoir, memories, waterski