This year seems to be flying by for me. Thankfully, we’re approaching my favorite season: Summer. Spring is just the precurser to Summer and and Fall is just the season after Summer. Winter is fun in it’s own right, so Winter’s just Winter, but yeh, Summer’s just about here!

Since this might be the last Summer I have a boat for a while, I plan on doing as much wakeboarding and camping with it as possible. This weekend i’m pretty busy, and the weather’s gonna be cold, and next weekend is Mike’s bachelor party, but i’m gonna go ahead and plan on doing some wakeboarding on the 17th: Armed Forces Day, according to my calendar. So if you’re interested, go ahead and drop me a line and pencil that in.

http://public.fotki.com/brightdude/users/rostik/2007_events/lake-perris-in-september/

with less than a month before summer ends, we made our first fresh-water trip of the year last weekend. on saturday the air temp was in the low 90′s, and the water was in the high 70′s/low 80′s. wakeboarding in fresh water is so much more pleasant since a wipeout doesn’t equal a mouth full of salt water, and as dave pointed out, seemingly less painful when you do fall? maybe the density of salt water vs. fresh water, or it might’ve just been in our heads but we were pushing ourselves and unlike most marine stadium trips, i have no neck or back aches.

taka’s figured out how to cross over the wake and isn’t just stuck riding on the right side of the boat anymore, and lauren is just on the cusp of getting the hang of it, so we got to spend our time just boarding and not teaching. we boarded for 4 or 5 hours on saturday, and then sunday morning we were out for about an hour or so until it started sprinkling so we packed it up and headed home.

the thing i hate about perris though, is that the majority of the people there either just bought a boat, or rented jetskiis and are learning how to use them for the first time, without using any common sense. at one point when i was pulling costin, a jetskiier was only about 10 boat-lengths behind him or so when we were crusing at 20+ mph. the dick was just following for almost no reason. when costin fell, the guy stopped right where he was and i guess was asking him if he was ok? anyway, i circled back and started yelling at him for following too close (this was an older black dude with his son on the back) and putting my skiier in harms way, bla bla bla, and he got all black and was like “don’t you disrespect me with that tone, yada yada” and was wanting me to apologize to him. i didn’t back down, ’cause he was in the wrong, and i was yelling ’cause i was angry+he was far away so i kinda had to. he even admitted that he didn’t know the rules. so we cruise back to the dock about half an hour later, and there’s like 10 black dudes standing on the dock, all standing next to the waterskii that had been ridden by the guy i yelled at! we circled back to think it over and decided that if they threatened to beat me over it, that i’d just go ahead and apologize. turned out that they barely even looked over at us when we docked, so another disaster was averted and it made for lots of funny, racist jokes at the camp fire.

after that story, don’t we look whiter than ever?! esp. with our wigga gang signs:

scenery at perris is much more interesting than the parking lots and houses that line marine stadium:

on sunday i took dave and his russian cohorts out wakeboarding. marine stadium was closed, but the water out in the long beach bay was a warm 75f. we spent about 5 hours out on the water, and today i was hurting pretty bad. this weekend’s supposed to be a bit cooler but i’m sure i’ll take out the boat on either saturday or sunday, so if you wanna get out there let me know.

the wife is getting up on just about every go, and is ready to start jumping the wake. well, maybe not yet, but at least she let’s me pull her fast :)

so i clearly underestimated her ability. before yesterday, taka had never even tried the wakeboard, having failed getting up on the water skiis twice last season, and having seen so many other peeps get yanked around by the boat to no avail. but yesterday, shali, sanam and me and taka took out the boat for some nice, non-pressure runs, and on her 4th attempt was up, and by the end of the day, she was up on just about every start.

it seemed we all figured a few things out yesterday… sanam almost got up, and probably will next time out. i think two instructions that i figured out in helping a beginner get up is 1. don’t lean back so hard and 2. turn your board immediately in the direction of your front foot. and shali’s getting pretty good at towing a skiier, and is finally letting me pull her fast enough so that a jump-able wake forms :)

around 4pm, the weather started getting pretty cold and it even started to sprinkle a bit. the water was cooler too at around 70F, so we dropped off the boat and had margaritas at acapulco, which is becoming the standard post-boating place to be.

we saw jen and james riding their cruisers right past us when we pulled the boat out of the water. that’s two weekends in a row. weird!

i finally got a chance to get some wakeboarding in on wednesday. by around 1p, most of the cloud coverage had burned off and the water in marine stadium was a warm 74f. i took some pretty nasty crashes off my first few jump attempts and my neck is still kinda stiff today, but it’s a lot like snowboarding where it takes a couple of outings to get as good as you were at the end of last season. everyone tried the wakeboard, except taka who we pulled around on the boogie board to her and everyone’s amusement. the boogie board actually broke, so i’m gonna have to find another solution for people that just want to have dumb fun like that.

by the time we were finished wakeboarding, the sun was already about to set, so we pulled into acapulco, had dinner and a few more drinks, then cruised out to the queen mary to watch the fireworks. the show was fun, and we were only about 100m or so from the barge that the fireworks were launching from. there were lots of new fireworks that i hadn’t seen before, although the finale was a bit lackluster.

AP) LOS ANGELES Heal the Bay’s annual end-of-summer beach report card is out and once again Los Angeles County has the state’s worst beach water quality.

And the county’s biggest loser is Long Beach. Heal the Bay executive director Mark Gold says Long Beach traditionally scores well during the summer months. But this year only 12 percent of the water samples taken in the area got high clean-water marks in comparison to 91 percent last year. City officials say part of the problem may have been a leaking pump station used by several boats.

and guess what the worst beach in long beach is? yep, mother’s beach, which is the beach for, yep… marine stadium. this morning on the local news they even showed footage of a boat going around marine stadium with a wakeboarder… i swear it was my boat =p anyway, looks like i’m done wakeboarding (at least there) for the year. hopefully they’ll’ve cleaned up by the time late spring rolls around.

last season we seemed content with just being able to stand up on the wakeboard and get pulled around the stadium. we’d cross the wake, but not really jump at all, and we did a bit of switch foot and carving but that was about it. this season we started jumping on the wake and getting some of our first “air”. after hanging out with mike’s buddy rob last weekend and then testing it this weekend, we figured out what we needed to do. to make it all look right, we had to clear the entire wake (up one side of the ramp and down the other).

well by adding more speed, slightly shortening the rope, and just being a bit more fearless, me and mike can now clear the entire wake. it’s the most insane feeling, because the landing is super smooth and fast that it doesn’t feel like you get nearly as much air as you do. we used to just jump on the front of the wake and land somewhere in the middle and that always felt huge because the landing was so harsh. but landing on the opposite side feels amazing. with the increased speed though, one of my wipeouts was pretty hard. i got flung so far under the water that i wasn’t sure which way was up for a split second. it actually took me a couple of runs to get my nerve back, but my last jump of the day was a clean wake-to-wake. anyway, this has upped my interest in getting a waketower now that we can actually do it right. too bad the season’s just about up.

finally had a chance to put together some of the video clips we’ve taken of wakeboarding this summer. i’m prolly gonna show this video at the wedding too (while me and taka are doing wardrobe changes), since it has some of the only footage i have of takako in it.