The title today may be weak. Depends on how hip you are to very, very old TV shows.
Either way, Steven’s in trouble. Kara’s in trouble. When you’re in trouble, it’s never good to get separated. So, y’know, they’re in Double Trouble.
“Double Couple Trouble.”
That should be a game show.
Steven, as has been pointed out by several readers, is not Hubris.
Poor Steven. He has common sense… or a least a common person’s sense of peril. He has… hesitancy. I don’t think Hubris hesitates so much. Or that other stuff.
Yeaaaah, if you go all the way back into the archives… Hubris doesn’t have a common person’s sense of peril or hesitancy. I guess that’s what made Kara think Steven was… what? A better choice for a long happy life?
We’ll just mull that over for a bit.
I don’t know about where YOU live, but mosquitos around here are pretty nightmarish, and this is a GOOD year- when there aren’t as many as have been in the past.
When I get bitten by mosquitos (or whatever word it is- attacked, sucked, fed upon, stung, zapped… whatever) I spend the next few hours with my skin crawling, convinced I’ve got the little bastards all over me.
I’m itching all over now just writing this.
If I were neck deep in a lake to hide from mosquitos, I guarantee I’d still feel like they were all over me.
Grawlix. I’ve told you that word before, haven’t I?
“Lake Snafu”… There’s gotta be something I can do with THAT name.
Okay, so some of you know that it’s my brother that’s the inspiration for a lot of Hubris cartoons. He’s more outdoorsy than I am, but he can’t draw for beans. So when I get a chance to hang out with him, there’s usually a good chance that something entertaining is going to happen, and I’ll be the only one with the kind of art skills to exploit it mercilessly.
Northern Wisconsin, on a lovely lake surrounded by all manner of cabins and summer homes and all, he and his brother-in-law decided to find out if you could stand on a SUP and be towed behind a motorboat. They were kind enough to give me a turn at it.
The last time I’d tried to stand on anything being towed behind a boat was nearly forty years before. And before I started kayaking much, I was insanely creeped out by large bodies of water (or, more accurately, by what my imagination filled those bodies of water with). That time all those years ago, I learned to faceplant expertly, but I did not learn to ski.
So the chances that I’d do something worth photographing this time seemed pretty high. I figured I could knock out a tooth or something clever.
As it was, my brother said, “Remember to lean back”, which I also recalled being told when I was twelve, so I leaned back.
He didn’t say to wait for the slack to leave the rope, so I hadda climb back on the damned board. Fine.
I stood up. I leaned back at the appropriate time, and I skied along behind a boat on a SUP. I’m told we didn’t go over about 14 miles an hour. When you’re ON the board, though, and have no idea how long you might be there, 14 miles an hour feels pretty good.
I should have put more effort into crossing the wake, and making a show of leaving the board, but that’s what my brother and Doug were for.
For now, you have to look at photos of me not flying off a SUP and into that nest of Cottonmouths they spooked me with tales of back on that lake in 1977.
Then you can look at photos of my brother doing a wildly entertaining dismount.
Nice, right? Look at that form… that style… that weirdly pained expression on my face.
Now, watch this action… My wife (the photographer on this trip) had worked out with Jeff that he would ‘try to get horizontal before he struck the water’.
And so…
There’s such a thing as kayak polo in the same way that there’s such a thing as kid’s sports organized by adults.
There’s such a thing as BoatBall in the same way that kids with a stick and a rock will occasionally play ball together.
If you have some kayakers, the requisite gear, a lake, a couple of floats attached to a couple of weights, a kayak polo ball or similarly sized tough ball, and everyone agrees to play nice, then you can play boatball.
Easy. Two teams. We have, in the past, tried to visually separate the teams with sets of XXL T-shirts (to fit over PFDs) and with Do-Rags over our helmets, but really, this is sandlot sports. Just remember who’s on your team, alright?
One team ‘kicks off’ to the other, and the ball’s in play. When you catch or pick up the ball, you cannot paddle. When multiple players reach in to pick up a ball, the paddles come away. No using paddles to shove boats or other players. You can use a paddle to block a pass, but not at the expense of anyone’s fingers. The paddle rules are probably the most important and the most broken. It’s tough to get into the heat of a game and let go of that paddle to do something else.
One can ‘dribble’, meaning you can toss the ball ahead of you and paddle to it, stop paddling long enough to throw it again and paddle to it. This is nearly impossible in a crowd, of course. The long pass often sets up some lucky player to try out these yards-eating moves. When everyone is clumped up around one end-zone, and a defensive player can hurl the ball halfway down the ‘court’ to a teammate, that teammate has some room to work for a minute. Only a minute, of course, because that whole crowd that used to be lumped up at one end is coming after him now, hoping to reach him before he scores. Once the crowd forms, and he has the ball, he (or she, you know what I mean) can use his (or her, whatever.) hands to steer or even set the ball on his spray skirt and try to make distance by paddling with his hands. Or you can pass to another teammate. Things move fast.
He, or anyone else for that matter, scores by carrying the ball or completing a pass with the ball across the imaginary line upon which a float is sitting. Remember those big bouncy toys you had a kid- the giant rubber balls with a handle molded into it? Those work well. You tie a rope into the handle and tie a boat anchor of some kind to the other end of the rope.
That’s where the ‘Play Nice’ part of this article comes in. If you’ve got people who are dead invested in Who Wins to the point that they’ll argue a pass and whether the line is “here” or six inches from “here” and whether the point is earned or not, then you don’t have a BoatBall game happening. You have AngryPaddlerBall happening. The BoatBallers here in town are notoriously bad at keeping up with the score, and as time to leave the park draws near, a player usually shouts “Next point wins!” and it’s on. The next point wins… unless it happens too fast and then everyone says, “Whoever makes the NEXT point wins!” and it’s on again.
Ten minutes later when everyone is loading boats onto their cars, it doesn’t matter who won, because everyone is still a paddler, the teams were different last week and they’ll be different again next week. AngryPaddlerBall players will either learn to relax or go play something else eventually.
So. BoatBall games generate wonderful stories. The time that everyone is wired up and play has been so fast and furious that when a goose flys just overhead, he’s nearly brained by a player who thought he was a ball being passed and acted automatically. The time that one player sees a lazy pass being set up that will pass just out of his reach and lurches out of his boat, managing to run off his own bow and interfere with the pass. The time that a player did three handrolls, clutching the ball, to alternating sides of his boat trying to get a clear pass. Maybe you have to be there for these stories to be any good, and that’s what this is about. You. Your friends. Go play BoatBall.
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