The first hint that I was not cut out to be the world’s greatest watersports person came at an early age. As I crashed to the ground trying to use a surf skimmer, twisting my knee, almost inserting my right foot up my own fundamental orifice and making a complete dick of myself.
Come to think of it, that first time was an omen. That last behavioural trait has been sustained over more than 50 years now.
Surf skimmers were round pieces of plywood that you shoved with your foot along the very thin water created when waves washed up the beach. Good riders could get hours of fun, excitement and exhilarating rides out of the things.
I was not one of them.
Unfortunately it seems I did not learn there. It took me many years of collisions with various pieces of water and other nautical substances before finding sailing. At least with sailing you were going slow when you hit things and that suited me just fine for a long time.
Water skiing. Yes, I tried it a couple of times. The first I seemed to spend an awful lot of time emulating superman as the boat took off and I flew into a mega-face plant at the end of the rope, getting a serious blast of salt water up the nostrils.
One day I got the hang of it and zoomed around the bay in what we would have called (in those simpler times) “gay abandon.” You’d use different words these days, I suspect. It soon ended in tears when, coming into the beach I squatted, me “speedos” parted and I received the biggest enema yet recorded by a human being.
My tears were very salty and I swear water was still dribbling out of my ears a week later.
I found similar success with the sport of windsurfing – with the emphasis on the ”suc” part of that word. Surely after two whole weeks of going head first over the side, then head first over the other side, it qualified as a “give it away you useless twat, you’re never going to be Barbara Kendall.”
At the end of two weeks I could get the thing to generically move in one direction but had not mastered other key aspects of sailboard sailing, namely: steering, turning, tacking, going upwind and exhibiting any form of basic control/.
The holiday ended and thus the sun came down on my not so illustrious windsurfing career.
Offshore powerboat racing is another high speed water sport that is best avoided. Spectacular to watch, but insane to partake of. I worked that out about 5 minutes into my first experience of it.
I had been invited by NZ champion Graeme Horne to have a ride in his original EIT Mover – a little Cougar cat. We flew up the harbour on a calm day. It was amazing. It was exhilarating. It felt bloody fast. All good so far.
Then we turned round just off Orakei wharf. If I recall, he trimmed the nose hard down and wrenched the wheel. The G-forces were so powerful I swear that my eyes came out of my head and looked back at me from the end of stretched retinal nerves. At least, that’s how it felt.
My arse was puckering so hard it took several large bites out of the foam seat squab.
And that was on a relatively short run in a small boat that was, by today’s standards, pretty tame. When I look at the Placemakers and Sleepyheads of today, I just shake my head in wonder. At the very least they’d need seat cushions made of bullet proof Kevlar.
I was fortunate that I never managed to achieve the heights of injury of my oldest brother.
The father of a mate of his had built a truly spectacular racing powerboat with a massive V8 – I seem to recall that the engine came from a McLaren Formula 5000 race car.
It was only a matter of time before the teenage hoons got their hands on this piece of kit for some “recreation.” They decided that a hundred mile an hour powerboat, with about a gazillion horsepower, would be just the berries for waterskiing behind.
It all ended in tears when my brother decided he needed to swing stylishly close to the beach just next to where those bikini-wearing girls were sitting. He immediately found himself short of water and took to running in 30ft strides up the beach.
As he says “I was doing quite well for the first couple of steps but the third and fourth were very problematic. I ended up doing a massive face-plant and breaking three toes and a collarbone.”
But, knowing my jammy burglar of a brother, he probably managed to translate his adversity into a sympathy shag. He’s good like that.
