Winching at Gamblers « OnBlueUnderCanvas

February 12, 2010
Posted by Lauren

Winching at Gamblers

It was a lovely Sunday morning, right around 8 o’clock, and Brandon Rau was up and at ‘em. “Come on,” he prodded. We were going winching.

Agent Orange & Gamblers

So what is winching? In this case, winching is wakeskating (or wakeboarding) without a boat. The winch pulls the wakeskater a certain distance over water. A river, stream, pond, waterfall… any pool of water. To dissect it further, this is the definition of a winch itself:

winch [noun] : a hauling device consisting of a rope, cable, or chain winding around a horizontal rotating drum, turned by a crank or by motor or other power source.

Brandon loaded the winch into the back of the truck. We all piled in front. Wetsuits, wakeskates and skate shoes too. We headed for a spot called Gamblers. It consisted of a pair of reservoirs, the water levels of which are independently controlled and separated by a concrete barrier. On any given day, you never know what the water level might be. As such, there’s always the chance that the concrete gap might be too wide. In an instance like this, Gamblers would be unridable.

But today, we were lucky. A perfect gradient ran from the first reservoir to the second. The bright orange winch was rolled into place next to the lower, second reservoir. Reed, who was first up, hauled out a few hundred feet of line to his starting position at the first, higher reservoir, diagonally across from the winch.

In the mean time I was setting up the camera for high-speed shooting. Nine photos per second the 7D cranked out. In theory, I shouldn’t miss a shot. Reed started out. Click click click click click click! went the shutter. “Hey Kirk? I hope we have a few more memory cards!”

Turns out, we did. We shot nearly 300 photos of Reed and Brandon winching as well as some casual candids. After reviewing the photos, we decided to show you them a bit differently. Because the pictures were shot so quickly – at nearly the same rate as video – we decided to combine all of the pictures into a video slideshow. And there you have it: our day compressed down into a minute. At the end you’ll notice a couple extras shots of Kirk. Hope you like the show.