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...