Chapter 1: Boating History

I’d been trying to get out waterskiing all summer but with little success. In fact, if it hadn’t been for a brief lucky break while out in California, I wouldn’t have been up on a ski yet this year! Even that time I’d only gotten to go out once but then there were more interesting things to enjoy, to say the least. It seemed each time we planned to go out for the weekend, either the weather sucked, my dad had to work or my Aunt Linda had some big open house to deal with.

Finally it looked like the stars had aligned. The weather forecast for Saturday was sort of iffy but Sunday promised to be a great day, maybe a little windy but I could live with that. Besides, even if we were stuck on shore, I was sure we would find plenty to keep ourselves busy.

As a general rule, when it comes to sports I generally can be classified as a complete klutz. Anything involving striking a moving object with another object - be it tennis, softball, or even badminton, has always seemed to be simply beyond my abilities. In fact, I can vividly remember coming home and crying on my mother’s shoulders one day when my jerk of a PE teacher declared in front of the entire class that I was the worst tennis player he’d ever seen!

Yet for all my failures in virtually anything athletic, there is one thing I CAN do better than most people - water-ski. Maybe it’s because my parents had me out on the water almost as soon as I could walk, but whatever the reason I LOVE to water-ski, with emphasis on WATER. For some reason my water-borne skills don’t translated to snow, but that’s another story...

So in these days where most people just use tubes and water-boards, I love to get up on my slalom ski and show off as I throw out a giant rooster tale in front of a bunch of hot guys on another boat or even on shore. It also doesn’t hurt that it’s a sport where I can get away with wearing next to nothing (or even nothing in the just the right situations).

As long as I can remember, my parents always had a boat, usually upgrading to a newer one every couple of years. The current one has an inboard motor which I l love because it is so quiet and it makes it easy to look back when someone is skiing. It also has a cut-out bow so we can sit up front of the driver and lay back, letting everyone see us as we drive by. Before you say anything about wanting to show-off, what is the point in spending all that money on a revealing bikini, on your tan all summer, if nobody gets to see you wearing it?

Another nice thing about our boat it that is makes skiing a lot easier too as it is so powerful that it’s like you’re up and on top of the water before you even have time to think about it. I can remember back when I was younger and even when I was pretty little I was still dragged through the water like a log for what seemed like ages before I finally was able to get up!

The rest of our family all enjoys skiing as well. In past years my Aunt Linda and cousin Kristen would often come along with us as the boat easily held the five of us. This summer we were only a foursome which was rather sobering, but it had been almost nine months now since my mom’s accident and those moments when it got hard to accept were getting fewer and farther between. Still, it was surely going to be a little awkward at first, even if nobody liked to mention it openly.

While some people skied in the river around Pittsburgh, my dad never was much of a fan of river water so typically we would drive to a state park and use one the lakes. Our favorite over the years was actually down in West Virginia, a couple of hours south at the Tygart Lake State Park. Like most lakes around us, it was created by a dam at one end and my dad once had tried to explain to me that it had something to do with water storage for flood control or something but all I cared about was it was great for skiing.

Typically we would spend at least one night, sometimes two depending on what my parents’ work schedules were. I’d tried a few times in the past to get my dad to let me take the boat down alone with Kristen. I was sure we wouldn’t have any problems finding some guys to help us but my dad was pretty adamantly against it from the start. Thus I had to wait until he was available AND the weather cooperated before we could get on the water - a tough combination to satisfy some years, especially this one it seemed.