Sam Johns SRH Australian Wakeboarding
From the SRH Blog…
“– I spotted this gap a couple of years ago when I was driving home from work, had to pull over and check it out. I had a look around, the thing was fuckin’ huge! It was a massive three stair setup, about a 15ft drop, but there was a walkway at the top with handrails you had to get over first. Just to add to it, the landing pond was less than a foot deep onto concrete so there wasn’t much room for error. It was definately a big gap but it had everthing in place for a perfect winch setup to gap the lot. A winch is basically a lawnmower engine mounted onto a big wheel with about 200 metres of rope to tow you with, it’s awesome cos you can ride in shallow water whereever you want, extends the boundarys of wakeboarding so much. I really enjoy winching dodgy street areas like this one so I figured I had to go back and shoot this at some stage.
So a few weeks later, we did that. We drove back down to the site with a kicker and a winch to tow me with. We floated the kicker into the top lake but it was too low, I would’ve clipped the first hand rail and ate shit. The only option was to lift the kicker higher, we floated it up a bit by putting a tube underneath, which was fucked because I had to ollie onto the kicker now. Anyway, we took the winch over to the other side and it was pretty much ready to hit. It probably wasn’t the best idea I’ve had but we were there now so I had to give it a shot. I towed at the kicker about 5 times without hitting it. Everyone there sorta said don’t worry about it, and not to hit it. I was over thinking about it and we had already got this far, so the next shot I just ollied onto the kicker and there was no pussying out after that. I landed about a foot from the edge of the last stair, so it was a perfect distance. Ran back up there with the handle and hit it a couple more times. I think on the fourth or fifth shot I landed on the last stair and just crashed into the water, I smashed my shoulder up a bit because it was so shallow, so that was pretty much the end of that. It wasn’t the best photo in the end cos it was about midday, the sunlight wasn’t real good and I didn’t have too many goes at it. But it was all good times, fun to setup and take a few hits at it. Sucks we didn’t get any footage of it… time to go back a bit more organized and do it again! –”
-Sam Johns