This week’s forecast for Madison, WI…
No complaints here!
Forecast courtesy of NOAA.
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All of the old posts from my old website bfooter.com.
Another Crazy Weekend
This past weekend was a busy one. With all of the crazy windy weather last week, I hadn’t skied since Tuesday so by the time the weekend arrived I was going through withdrawal.
Saturday morning arrived and with it, so did the Clean Lakes Festival. I met Imhof to pick up the sound equipment and then on the way to the festival we drove by the lake and were greeted by this.
Look at the glass calm water that I didn’t get to ski on!
Needless to say, knowing the lake was that nice made going to the festival that much more difficult, but it was important for the ski team. Spent pretty much the entire day outside as we arrived at 8am, run/walk started at 10, followed by the festival at 11. It ended about 6pm and then we had to clean up and then did our best to try and finish off the beer left in the half-barrels. The festival went very well… had nearly 100 people in the run/walk and had a decent amount of people show up for the first year.
The start of the 5K Run/Walk
A Bedazzled 7
You can see more pictures of the Mad-City Clean Lakes Festival over at Jim’s Photo’s.
After I arrived home about 10pm I turned around and headed to the Bells for what was suppose to be more drinking as that was where the half-barrels were going, but I arrived to just find John, Nick (aka Brad’s little brother) and Bartz drinking in the kitchen. John soon disappeared and then it was down to 3 drinkers. Then Bartz faded. T-Bell then arrived for a brief appearance before she to disappeared. Then I disappeared since I was planning on skiing the next morning at 8am.
Sunday morning arrived early, but it was a good one. Blue skies and very nice weather all around. I arrive at the lake and then T-Bell arrives with Nick (who was filling in for John). In my sets I do a multitude of laps around the bay that totaled nearly 7.5 miles through the weeds and even had my best one foot of the year so far, holding it for several seconds without get a face full of spray for a change. I managed to talk T-Bell into taking advantage of the glass calm water that is amongst the weeds. She puts on a show for Nick by doing some wake crossings, tumble turns and one foots and both feet. Then we get a call form Lisa asking if she can come take a run and 20 minutes later she joins us at the lake. Not really sure why, but T-Bel and Lisa started doing some stupid human tricks in the boat.
T-Bell doing a Stupid Human Trick
After arriving home about noon and eating some lunch, I took a nice long nap before heading to the ski show that night. Skied in 3 acts that night, opening, conventional doubles and ending. That night I realized I was sunburned from being outside pretty much most of the weekend.
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Clean Lakes Festival
This weekend the Mad-City Ski Team is hosting the 1st Annual Clean Lakes Festival at Warner Park on Madison’s northeast side. In addition to raising money and awareness for the lakes we also wanted to get some PR for the ski team. It is still surprising to meet people that have lived here a long time that have never heard of us.
The Clean Lakes Festival kicks off the Take a Stake in the Lakes Week here in Madison. Besides the festival there are a lot of other water-centric events taking place which The Capital Times details nicely here. They also had a good article about the festival.
Stop down on Saturday, watch the 5K Run/Walk which starts at 10am or just come down between 11am and 6pm to learn about the lakes, eat some food, drink some beer and listen to the bands.
Links:
Clean Lakes Festival
Mad-City Ski Team
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A Good Night of Practice for Me
Besides the cool temperatures tonight, the Mad-City Ski Team had a good night of practice. Already about 20 ladies in our ballet line that’s hitting the water. No really big pyramids, but we put a lot of them on the water tonight. Even did a little work on our “Big Act” but it isn’t really a big act yet. More of a mid-size act as this point of the summer.
What was good “for me” was I was in a lot pyramids tonight, made all my starts and only came back with a sore foot from when I dropped a ski on my foot. Funny part was the only start that I came close to struggling with was with the smallest girl at the end of the night. I seriously need to enforce my minimum height requirement.
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Jumping to Conclusions
This post is slightly off topic. Still water skiing related, but the not so fun part of it. Politics. A couple disturbing things found their way into my inbox tonight. I promise that this will be as close I get to talking politics on this blog.
The first is local. Madison. I had previously heard that the Madison Parks Commission is considering a ban of alcohol in Law Park. Law Park is the tiny strip of grass just east of the Monona Terrace where the Mad-City Ski Team, which I’m a member of, holds our ski shows. I’m nearly 100% certain that the trigger for this movement is the homeless people that have setup camp in the park and drink. I’ve witnessed them do lots of things drunk including one of them beat another’s head into the rocks on the shoreline. Members of the ski team have made numerous calls to the Madison Police regarding them. The council has the right idea of trying to clean up the area, but banning alcohol in just the one location probably isn’t going to fix the problem, just move it to another public location that allows drinking.
What triggered me to write about this topic is this. I’ll let this bloggers words speak for themselves:
I run along Lake Monona through the park all the time, and I wonder if it’s less of a problem with alcohol and more of a problem with the five or six homeless chaps camped out on a park bench just down from Monona Terrace…or maybe the water skiing club is getting out of hand. The anglers along Monona Terrace itself are rarely drinking from my recollection.
– Brad V from Letters in Bottles
What I found concerning is the inclusion of the “ski club” as potentially being part of the problem. Whether or not the person is seriously including the ski team as part of the problem or just saying it sarcastically, people can definately read it the wrong way because sarcasm is not easy to convey through the written word. It is comments like this that people can take out of context or interpret the way they want that can create problems.
If this person observed the ski team for any length of time, he would notice that there is wide range of ages participating ranging from 6 or 7 years old to 50 plus, entire families that are members so they can participate in a sport as a family, single adults, college students and high school kids all participate. The ski team is a family sport and a family environment.
Another water skiing related news story that showed up in my inbox is not so local. California to be exact. It seems that they have decided to ban water skiing in a bay even though the sheriff commented at the hearing for the issue that water skiing isn’t the problem. None of the fatalities were water skiing related. Hmm, we have a dangerous strip of water way, frequented by lots of boaters, some of them probably drinking, causing issues. If I was going to water ski in an environment like this I would be cautious as I don’t like to ski when there is a lot of traffic on the water and have people that I trust with my life driving as that is how important the driving portion of skiing is and it seems that the people that have skiing there have been doing the same. Yes there were skiing injuries, but they were from people “falling” as the article put it. This is another example of poor legislation. We have a problem. Let’s ban water skiing instead of actually enforcing the laws already on the books regarding boating safety and alcohol consumption which would solve the problems if there adequately enforced.
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Mad-City Dual
This past weekend I competed in the Mad-City Dual. It is a small figure 8 barefoot tournament held in Monona Bay in Madison. I believe there was approximately 30 footers in the tournament. For those that don’t know, here is a brief description of a figure 8 tournament. Two footers are behind the boat going at the same time, the boat drives in a figure 8 pattern. What that means is as the boat goes around it crosses it’s own wake each time it crosses the middle of the eight. The two footers continue until 1 falls and then the other wins.
The bay was, as usually, very weedy. Here are some pics showing just how nasty it was.
Of all the people in the tournament, my first run was against Bugsy. Neither one of us had designs of winning the tournament, but we both wanted to put on respectable shows. I’ve been making my slalom starts this year so far (all 3 of them) but opted to go out on two skis and no worries about the start. My step was clean and since Bugsy won the coin toss and picked the outside for the first corner, I had the inside. I held the corner nicely and then make it through the “chop” in the middle of the eight. Second corner arrives and just as we’re coming out of the corner, somehow my inside foot catches and my run comes to end. Going in, I had three goals… make it around the first corner, make it through the middle and then finish an eight. 2 out of 3 on the first run. Pretty good even though I had lost. Our run had been the longest run so far and held for a few more runs which made me feel good even though I had lost.
Before I head out on my first run
Heading out for the first run
About to make the step
Footing
Coming out of the first corner
Coming back to shore
Bugsy & Me
I did get a kick out of a comment I received after my run. It went something like… “It takes a lot of guts to go out there on two skis and then you put on a good show.”
Me and my trusty skis
My second run didn’t go so well. Missed my step. Needless to say I was a little pissed off about that. I hadn’t missed a step in good water in a long time. My day was done.
Bugsy did pretty well in the tournament. T-Bell was happy she made it through the first set of rollers once. Beau kicked some ass, knocking off some big names and skied for quite a while on Saturday.
Don’t know who’s footing, but I love this shot. I wish there was one of Bugsy and Me like this.
At the end of the day, it came down to a 52 year old vs a 50 year old for the championship. Mike Netzer, the 52 year old won. Here’s a video of the final run.
The footers – pic from BareFootSki dot com
After the tourney and grabbing some dinnner I’d eat, I headed downtown to meet up with a bunch of friends for dinner at Edo’s to celebrate Sandy’s birthday. They serve sushi. I don’t do sushi so that’s why I ate ahead of time. After dinner, we headed to the terrace and had some more beers and then to Brokah’s on the square for more drinks. Everyone had a good time and I was glad I wasn’t driving.
Bugsy, his man bag, two pitches of beer and smoking a cigarette.
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Barefoot Central Show Ski Challenge Videos
Finally had a chance to watch what I think are the two new videos out there. They were filmed up on Lake Sinisippi in late April and features skiers mainly from the Beaverland Must-Skis and Sinissippi Ski Club. The first one shows the crashes and the second one shows the trash talking. It’s nice to see some people that are as foolish as I am when it comes to skiing early in the season.
You can check out all of their “show ski” videos by going here. The crash video is here and the trash talking video is here.
They also have video of a flier from a bridge, but I won’t link to it to promote it since the way it was done it is basically a deep water. Boat didn’t move until he hit the water. A flier involves jumping off the dock (or whatever your jumping off of) and while still in the air the boat needs to accelerate. Takes a good driver as well as a good footer.
Links:
Barefoot Central
Beaverland Must-Skis
Sinissippi Ski Club
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A Good Night of Practice
Actually had warm weather, calm winds and calm water. Yes, you read that correctly. Calm water. It was almost weird.
After completely messing up my first flier by mistiming my jump badly, I nailed the second attempt and made a nice long loop (dock to the bridges and then looped back). Too bad they were only pulling me at 38 MPH. I’m six foot and 230 pounds. I need more than 38 MPH to be comfortable on my barefeet. While holding my position in the curl while going around the corner, I couldn’t see a thing. I was trapped in a ball of spray. Later, I did a couple of 3 highs to get my pyramid legs back underneath me. Both of those starts were much better than last weeks.
The team also managed to get the docks straightened out again by moving the anchors and did some work on the jump to get it straightened as well. Plus, our triple rig made an appearance as well.
This made for a good night of practice.
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Long Weekend Update
I guess the weekend really started on Thursday night when I caught POTC3. For the uninitiated that’s Pirates of the Caribbean 3. See my quick review in the previous post.
In reality, the weekend started with some frantic calls on Friday afternoon to arrange some water skiing for after work. As I sat in the dentist chair getting my teeth cleaned (literally) I managed to finalized the arrangements. About and hour latter I was launching the boat at Olin Park waiting for Sandy and Teri to join me. I figured since I plan on competing in the Mad-City Dual next weekend I should do at least one step off. Since it was a calm late afternoon we started in the main lake. I (surprisingly) made my slalom start and tried to do a step off but the constant wally rollers made it impossible for me to get comfortable. Finally, seeing no end in sight, I punted. I then decided to give it one more go in the main lake. Once again, I surprised myself by making my slalom start again and then managed to make my step which felt clean and according to Teri, looked clean. After going through some rollers and seeing more, bigger rollers coming up, I decided to make it a very brief run. Also wanted to go back and pick up the drop ski. After Teri & Sandy had skied, we headed into the bay so I could do a couple long runs. First run started with another step-off (once again after making my third deep water slalom start of the night and in a row) and ended back at my ski after making the loop in the bay. After handing the ski into the boat, I took one more run and made another loop around the bay.
Finally warm enough to go sleeveless. You can also see the weeds we are constantly footing through.
Me after my footing sets.
Dr Sandy driving the boat.
T-Bell posing for the camera.
After putting the boat away, I headed to the Stadium Bar to watch some friends play vball and then ended up staying there till about 11 before heading to the Dane for some more drinks. Finally made it home as the hour approached 1am.
Saturday morning I woke up to a cool, overcast day and headed down to practice planning on helping repair the dock with John. In all honesty, I didn’t do much other than move the docks or hold them in place as John worked on anchoring them. After spending an hour or so in the cool water, we had the docks back in place as best they could be.
The rest of the day was relatively low key. A little TV, a nap, inspected the trailer brakes, making calls about skiing the next day.
Sunday morning arrives and I finalize plans at 8am for skiing at 9am. I hit the lake with 7 & Lori. I do some more loops around the bay which is now nearly weed filled and 7 does some footing too. He’s been working on his deep water sense last summer and finally has it figured out. He’s had a lot issues with “cheeking out” and after getting a tip a few weeks ago from a UW skier he now makes more than he misses. Still took him 3 runs to get 2/3 of the way around the bay, but he’s making his starts now. In his defense, on his 3rd run, moments after standing up he hit some fishing boat rollers which ended his run.
That’s me in the ball of spray and those are the weeds in the background.
7 on his “Police Evidence”
After lunch and a nap, I headed down to the ski show. The show was a little rough, but a good start.
Sandy and Teri doing fliers in the show.Photo from Jim’s Photos.
Afterwards, grabbed some pizza with Bugs & Scott and then headed to a bonfire for some drinks. Stayed out way to late even though some people thought I was leaving early. But getting home at nearly 2am, I stand by that it was way too late.
Monday was relaxing. Did some work around the house, mowed the lawn and visited with the neighbors. The evening turned really nice and would have been good to the hit the lake, but it was nice to relax too.
For full size versions of these pictures, you can view them in my Picasa Web Album here.
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POTC3
The quick review (and that’s what this review will be) is the movie starts off slow, lots of different stories going on. Almost confusing. Towards the middle, the stories start to come together. The first half drags on just a bit as they put all these stories together and then they get to the ending and the ending is worth the wait. I’d recommend watching at least the 2nd one again to refresh your memory about the story since it basically ended with a cliff hanger. Well worth watching, although I liked the 1st one the bes of the 3.
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Mad-City Wedge 