Swerbo.com

Well, I haven’t written in a long time, and since I’m feeling a little nostalgic lately because my twentieth high school reunion is coming up, I decided to post a couple of nice photos I made some 15-20 years ago.

The first photo was shot using my friend Dave’s camera on Cayuga Lake while growing up in Ithaca, New York. We were among some of the first people to ever ride what is now called a wakeboard. Back then, it hadn’t really been done much before, and there weren’t many options as far as getting a board to ride on the lake. Remember, this is back in the day when no one even knew what a snowboard was, let alone allow you to ride one at a ski resort.

A company called Skurfer started making a halfway-decent boards right about the time this photo was made, probably 1986 or so considering we were still in high school. Eventually, Dave got the brilliant idea to use bungee cords to help hold his feet onto the Skurfer so he could shred that much harder. The Skurfer only had windsurfing-like straps for your feet with no backs to them — today, wakeboards just use water ski booties, seems so obvious now! Anyway, We submitted this picture to a Waterski Magazine photo contest and actually finished in second place or something like that. Whatever place we ended up with, it was enough that they published the photo in the print magazine as one of the winners of the contest. How classic is that?

The second photo was again made by me using Dave’s camera up on the Flatirons in Boulder, Colorado during our college years. It must have snowed three feet in one day, and classes were canceled that day, so we decided to climb up to the base of the Flatirons and build ourselves a nice big ski jump to do tricks off of all day. Now those were the good old days!