wakeboarding

I have been meaning to write about wakeboarding for a while. Wakeboarding is lovely, though I certainly wasn’t feeling quite so affectionate towards it while grumpily driving to Punggol for our 8 a.m. start on Sunday morning. But once we were the only boat out, speeding over a vast calm expanse of water in sun which hadn’t turned scorching yet, with egrets in the distant shallows and an occasional gull, I realized just how much sense an early start makes.

Over the course of the morning, I was relieved to find that contrary to what my first attempt at wakeboarding indicated, I am not the world’s most spastic wakeboarder. After various absurdly comedic falls, I finally managed to get to a standing position and coast along happily behind the boat for a fair distance.

So, two lessons in, here are some things I have learned about wakeboarding:

• Going for longer sessions with fewer people on the boat is worth the extra expense. You will learn faster and fewer people will witness your initial spasticity. But like Baz said, wear sunscreen.
• If you are short-sighted, and decide not to wear your contact lenses for fear of sewage-derived eye infections from the Punggol water, you risk missing everyone else’s madly exaggerated instructions from the boat, such as when they jump around like monkeys to tell you to stop squatting and bloody stand up, or when they assume twisted hunchback poses to tell you that you look like a twisted hunchback.
• Falling onto your left boob hurts, even when it’s onto water.
• When removing one’s lifejacket upon returning to the boat, check first to see that your right boob has not slipped out of your bikini. Thank goodness the only other girl on the boat was the only person who saw.
• Wakeboarding is hazardous to boobs.