Funbox Funday

by Pat McGucken
24 / 06 / 2010

So an impromptu trip to visit family this weekend saw me with an opportunity to track down an old friend who escaped over the imaginary border between the North and South a couple of years ago. Not only has ‘Solid’ Jim Sedgwick gone south, but he seems to have fully embraced boinging around on the cable so I thought I’d better go and investigate.
 
I’d seen pictures of Box End Park and obviously heard all about it from other riders but you don’t really appreciate just how cool a set up it is until you go there. The cable lake has a ‘spit’ down the middle so it doesn’t get that horrible chop that some lakes suffer from when the cable is busy. This effectively gives you two long thin lakes separated by a strip of grass with obstacles in ‘both’ lakes. The advantage of the lake being divided like this is that the obstacles are never at silly distances from the centre line of the cable so you are never at full stretch on the cable line when you are on a rail - for those of you that are a little slow on the uptake that means you get pulled off the side of stuff a lot less and its way easier to hit a line of obstacles on both your left and right sides on each pass down the lake - bonus.
 
Anyways I arrived on Saturday afternoon to find quite an excited buzz around the place. Not really expecting people to be quite so excited about my arrival I was quite touched until I realised that the excitement was mainly directed towards the new behemoth of a fun box floating on the far side of the lake.
 
Ok so you’re thinking “a fun box? Big deal” but this is one seriously big-ass piece of construction. It seems that the nice people at Ultra Sport, the UK importers for O’Brien and Liquid Force, thought that as they already had a Liquid Force rail in existence that they should even things up and have an O’Brien one. The new box consists of a regular fun box with a wall ride on one side and an A frame on the other side, but instead of going with the usual A frame transition which follows the transition of the box up, this A frame kind of grows out of the top of the box. This basically means that you have to gap off the box transition to make it onto the A frame - nice touch eh?
 
Anyway despite the fact that it hadn’t been properly branded yet with all its appropriate O’Brien logos and such, I took a bunch of photos, so I will stop trying to explain it in words and let you look at the pictures of it instead.
 
 All that is left to say is that my investigations led me to discover the following:
Solid has actually gotten pretty good at boinging around on the cable.
He seems to have replaced his V-Dub van with half a car.
If you go to Box End Park, which you undoubtedly should, and there is a small girl called Katie Batchelor out riding and you didn’t bring your “A” game then you are probably gonna have a humbling experience.
Ok see you all at Wakestock

Peace