Tequila & Chocolate Cake

by Pat McGucken
18 / 08 / 2008

Sometimes I wish wakeskating was bigger, like when I need a new skate and there isn’t one available or when my shoes fall to bits and I can’t find replacements in the UK or when most of the cable parks in the country have rails that look like the Loch Ness monster and give very little consideration to smaller more technical rails and boxes that skaters can session, but it isn’t. Wakeskating is very small, tiny even. Added to which all the skaters are in opposite corners of the country so rarely meet up to show the strength of their ever-increasing numbers. However there is an upside to the small community, a shiny silver lining to our cloud - within 20 minutes of having an idea like “mmm should we have a party?” you can have contacted nearly the whole scene and found out that they are in the car on their way to your house.

Actually we had all talked at ThinkTank and decided we needed to ride together more, not just wait around for someone to put on an event but to saddle up and visit each others riding spots. Part of the point of all this was to get the other guys to ride behind a boat with an actual wake, something they don’t get to do very often. Us Northern Monkeys are devoted to making sure that no one forgets the importance of shredding the lip on their wakeskate and this was our chance to help our southern friends to see the light and join the cause.
Terry Hannam (from now on officially known as “Terry the Hat”) had been meeting up with the Dirty South crew and Jason McCloud of the Clan-McCloud and hanging out, riding and generally getting into mischief ever since ThinkTank so we decided to invite them up to ride with us at Port Haverigg and party for the birthday of one of our wakeskaterettes, Leanne Swales.

All week the weather man had been wrong and we’d had flat water pretty much every day, so the fact that he said it was going to be windy at the weekend wasn’t really phasing any of us - good times. Unfortunately the same weatherman obviously decided that he should buck his ideas up and do something clever for the weekend - bad times. When we got up on Saturday morning all excited to ride it was blowing about force 6 straight down the lake just like the weatherman said it would. Shredding the lip was looking unlikely to say the least, but where there’s a wakeskate there’s a plan, and we had one. It was called plan B. Luckily winches are now standard travelling kit for wakeskate road trips so we dragged one of our rails round the lake to a sheltered spot and by midday were well on the way to putting Plan B into action.

By the time the rail had been thoroughly abused and even Terry wanted to eat more than winch, we were getting dangerously close to being late for our own party so we headed out on a mission for fish and chips as a quick way of getting some stodge in us before hitting the bar. The party was somewhat eventful and the story is probably better told in photo format and by whispered word of mouth so that’s all I’m saying about that.

All in all we succeeded in doing what we set out to do, despite the wind; Ride with friends that we don’t see enough and push it all a little further. We even managed to (under the weight of serious hangovers) get out behind the boat on Sunday and do some of that lip shredding that we love so much.

So there you go, all you apparently need is a birthday, some cake, lots of tequila, 3 winches and some rails and you are pretty much set for a wakeskate party of epic proportions. I think there may be a moral to this story but I’m no longer sure what it is. However after spending a weekend with my friends this is what I learnt….
1. Terry the Hat doesn’t care where he sleeps.
2. Terry the Hat can drink a lot of tequila.
3. I can drink as much tequila as Terry with or without a hat.
4. I don’t stay conscious as long as him after trying to do the above.
5. I don’t sing “Barbie Girl” on the karaoke after drinking the above.
6. Terry does.
Anyone wishing to make sense of the above should click the little pictures over there on the right of the page and all will become clear…ish!