Waterskiing in October -- New England Fall Foliage at its Peak

My legs and shoulder muscles are still aching after I spent last Sunday afternoon waterskiing on the lake in front of D'Anna's — Martin's Pond, in North Reading... But oh, was it worth it!! — Just look at a sample of the New England Fall Foliage at its Peak: Moreover, it was an unseasonably hot and sunny day — albeit past mid October — so we just had to take advantage of it even though the group of us got together ostensibly to help D'Anna wash and put away his Ski Nautique speedboat for the season. Of course, the entire lake was rimmed with fabulous Fall colors like this, but the 10 snapshots that went into this panorama only show about 15% of the lake. If you click on the panorama, you see it much bigger than above but apparently even the "full size" option in Google's blog still only gets you an image that's one tenth the actual size. A more satisfying choice would be to download or view the full panorama here; it's (6055 x 864 pixels). Viewed in full height, about half way along the horizontal scroll, you can see D'Anna's boat trailer where we launched the boat from his yard. Not shown in the picture is all the drama around the truck suddenly having no brakes just when we needed it to launch the boat.

There are many more pictures (here, in Flickr) of the other men who skiied with us... but this is my blog so I'm going to feature myself (on the right): my 2nd time up on D'Anna's wakeboard. As you can tell from the "Oh, Shit!!!" look on my face, this picture was taken just before I fell on my a**s. I didn't actually do as well, this time, as I had my first time on the wakeboard (last August). But it really is a blast so I'm looking forward to getting better at it next year. Wakeboarding is "just like" snowboarding, not that I actually know because it's really my two girls who know all about that.




One of the highlights of the afternoon was when John Brigham successfully dropped one ski — slalom on his first try — as you see below in my YouTube video clip. Look closely at the beginning of the video clip and you'll see that he starts out on two skis. He drops one, and then makes it around the entire lake, going in and out of the wake, never having even tried slalom before; amazing !

The video clip has an audio track, but it's really just the noise of D'Anna's (340 horsepower!) inboard, so you might wanna mute your sound for this one. Initially I thought it was "by design" that Google filtered the "bad sound" out, but it was just that my mute button had gotten stuck.

Either way, the better "voice" is what you see in John's face as "he really does it" !!!

Featured in the Flickr Album "Waterskiing in mid-October -- New England Fall Foliage at its Peak": LaBarge, D'Anna, Pammett, John Brigham and Esteverena.