Wet Behind the Ears
Yeah, baby, yeah! I finally can add something to my long neglected Play section.
For the last few weeks, I’ve been hitting the water with wakeboarding. I’d done before when I first arrived in Hong Kong in 2000 when my mentor had the bug. Back then it sorta didn’t really interest me excessively. I think it had something to do with the fact that I was still a scrawny little runt, as opposed to Adonis that I am now, and that I couldn’t for the life of me get up.
This all changed on a junk trip at the start of July where they had a boat and wakeboard available. Timidly James, Amy, Elsa and myself decided to try it out again. With no real intention of wanting to get into the water, I spent my time hurling advice at the my poor friends in the water in the hope that they wouldn’t cotton onto the idea of the blind leading the blind.
Somehow I managed to get the itch to give it a try. Spending all the time telling people how you think it’s done is bound to do that and I think it was also time for me to either put up or shut up. So with the pressure to perform adequately (i.e. stand on the damned board for longer than 5 seconds), I’d say I gave it a good run. I didn’t stand on the board for more than 5 seconds and that was about it for the day since the boat had to return us to the junk.
But the bug was there. I had managed to get up and stay up albeit for 5 seconds. And so a week later four of us descended on Tai Tam to have another stab at it. To be sure, only Amy and myself made a competent showing of it but I suspect that was because we had plenty of time to learn from our friends’ mistakes in technique. The instructor decided to do everything verbally and choose to correct mistakes rather than teach proper technique. This led to a Cantonese version going to Amy and subsequently to myself whose vocal travelled only marginally better than hers. While it was great for her and myself since he got to learn things from the corrections and the observations, it meant that for some it was still a struggle to get out of the water at the end of the two hours.
A later session with a different instructor showed me a neat trick to get beginners out of the water quicker. With the boat still, the rider sits in the position that they should be in before the boat pulls them out of the water. Then the instructor pulls the rider out of the water manually, correcting both bad posture and bad actions. It also gets the beginner used to the sensation of being pulled out of the water and how to react properly to it.
My first two sessions on the water didn’t see much improvement from my side. I was still getting used to finding the most stable position and in my own time, trying to cross both wakes. Thankfully last week, we changed drivers and someone more experienced came along with us. It gave me an opportunity to observe some more advanced techniques and spurred me on to be more confident on the board. The board was different (a Bad Ass Shroom 141) and it felt more fluid than the board we used before. The timidness of staying on was gone at least and the excitement of just being pulled along for the ride was wearing thin. I wanted the opportunity to do more.
Today that opportunity came when I managed to hit the water for an hour by myself after a friend bailed out on me. I managed to get the same instructor as last week and this time he actually spent time coaching me on the more advanced techniques. After the first run where I was carving up inside the wake and trying my best to make crossing the wake look like an accomplishment, he asked me whether I wanted to learn to jump. Err…not really, but hell, I’ll give it a shot.
I sorta learned what a face plant is. I also learned the board can come off easily in aforementioned manoevre. It’s also painful enough to the extent of let’s not do that again. Props to me though because I did manage by the end to do the graceful fuckup whereby you just let go of the rope and sink slowly into the water.
One thing I have to remember is that for me, the two key elements to wakeboarding are to not look directly at the water and to relax. This held me in good ground when I was faffing around with just staying up and crossing the wake, and when I remembered, it stood me in good ground when trying to do the two tricks I was going to practice today.
For the jumping, once I understood the theory and technique from the instructor, when I used my intuition to execute the maneovre, it all came together. Going toeside before jumping the wake is perhaps the best rush that I had so far out of the sport. I believe it’s called “loading the line” and there’s an instant just before you go for it that you feel all the physics pushing you to that pinnacle. Damn, it’s so hard to describe but such a wonderful feeling!
Rather uninspiringly, this excitement was counterbalanced with the pure technique building trick of doing a surface 180. Okay, I managed a few going back and forth the way I came (so not a surface 360) but apart from building my technique, it wasn’t all that inspiring. Again, it was all about the two keys of staying up - look up and relax - although I must say that going goofy foot forward, as they say, really did feel uncomfortable.
I think it revealed a problem in my balance though which is something that I still need to work on. My back leg consistently felt tired and towards the end of the session, the instructor told me to distribute my weight more evenly for better control. This was something I should have known at the start of the session, since I felt myself having more control over the board when the weight wasn’t on the back leg so much. Unfortunately, after an hour of wakeboarding to my self, I was exhausted and my technique was going to go nowhere for the rest of the day.
I’ve felt myself improving a lot over the last few weeks and my craving to be on the water is just getting worse and worse. Thankfully, I resisted the urge to buy any form of board (it helps having no money to do so but also helps that there weren’t any pretty pictures on it either). The reason why I’m thankful is that now that I’m getting more experience, albeit not much), I’m knowing more and more what I want from my ride.
For wakeboarding in Hong Kong, check out Island Wake for the retail side and Wakeboard HK for booking information. Book through Frankie and for beginners, recommend Eddie as the instructor.
