What a great time tonight. This has been my second WW meetup/demo. We love hosting, so hit us up if ever going to be around Lake Oroville. We did this this past weekend with Randy Morrell and his crew, but we only had video. I will throw that up later this week or on the weekend. They had fun on the wake9 cruiser. Frank Wolter wanted to get a board for himself and he is a big guy, so we took him out. I told him to bring his kids and we will all surf since we were going out anyways. It was a great afternoon/evening. I love going out, and everyone just wants to surf til you have to turn on the lights, and then you have to stop when you can’t see anymore. Lake was perfect, and almost had the place to ourselves. RJ is starting to land his stall 360, take a look at the pictures.
We had a great afternoon, and Chris still wanted to surf again, he loved the SMED Wombat. We turned on the lights and he surfed back in. We finished it off with a run to Taco Bell where Frank treated us to dinner.
What a great day today. It was perfect, hot, but not too hot, you know? About 90ish, and water was high 70s. So great to jump in, and refreshing. The whole lake was glass, everyone wakesurfed, and Jesse almost got up. How great is that? She is GOING to get up, I just know it. We did a ballast weighting video today, check it out here:
We had a great time out this past weekend with the Hortons. Dennis was a great teacher, and you can’t spend time with Bre without having fun. Thanks a lot Hortons!
We had an incredible day on Lake Almanor yesterday, we took the whole day to spend up there. Conditions were perfect til about noon, then the famous Lake Almanor wind picked up. White caps started around 2ish, so we got off. There is no real shelter from the wind at Lake Almanor, which is a shame, since it is so beautiful.
All that said, this is not the reason why I was so excited about yesterday. I was excited from watching my kids. First there is Thomas and Maddie. Some of you may know a little bit more of their story, and seeing them progress in wakesurfing chokes me up. Just watching their confidence, and their willingness to push and keep learning has been amazing. They have only had that new GROM board from Walker for a month, but the progression from that point has been amazing. What a help to have a board designed for them. They took out the back fin for the first time yesterday, and really enjoyed the extra performance. We tried taking it out before and they were too unstable, so this was very cool. I am adding a video to this post and you can watch T & M shoot the curl, at least how it can be done on a wake and not a real ocean wave with the curl over your head.
Then there is Jesse. If watching T & M causes me to choke up, J knocks me on the floor. I am going to share a little bit more about Jesse since I want to document this a bit. Jesse came to us from Butte County Adoption placement and was a very special needs baby. Long story short, this little girl had no chance and if we didn’t take her… I can’t even think about that. J was born premature and addicted to meth, and we were told when we took her home that we should prepare ourselves that she will most likely not be able to walk or talk. We took her in and loved her as our own from day one. She has always been my little girl. Geez, I can’t even type this without getting “something in my eye”. She had to sleep in our room from the get go because she couldn’t breathe well, and we had to be able to react if there was an issue.
Jesse wasn’t like other babies. As time progressed she just layed there and didn’t do the normal things that babies do. She never attempted to roll over or sit up, or anything. I was determined to help her be the best she could be. I was ok with whatever God allowed he to do or not to do, but still wanted to give her the chance to be the best she could possibly be. So I did some research, and learned that one of her main problems could be that she can’t learn naturally, but needs everything TOUGHT to her. When these kids are born this way, it is as if they are actually MISSING pieces of there brain. Things don’t connect normally, and stuff doesn’t process right, and parts of the brain don’t communicate with each other. But through our research, during this development stage it is actually possible to STIMULATE the brain to reconnect and rebuild itself. Doctors actually say it is akin to brain surgery without the knife. So I started rolling her over, over and over and over. Nothing. I started sitting her up, then back down, and again, and again. Constantly, many times a day trying to teach her these things, stimulate some part of the brain. At first not much happened. But then one day she started to try roll over by herself! Then she tried to sit up, then the was able to sit up, and stay up.
Ok, now it was exciting. Its amazing, how much you take for granted, when your children just naturally learn the things they are supposed to at given ages. Jesse was so far behind, but I worked with her every day and she was actually slowly catching up. You can just imagine this huge 375lb dude trying to teach this little baby how to rollover, how to smile, how to sit up, crawl, every little thing. She eventually walked, and talked, and then sometime around 2 yrs old, she started learning things on her own by watching everyone else. It was such an amazing thing to see her start to learn on her own. I really think we performed brain surgery. Now all that is incredible, but there was one side effect. I did this all on my own. Not because my other kids or wife didn’t want to help, they helped all the time, but I took it on as my personal mission. All of a sudden, when her personality started revealing itself, we realized she was a 400lb obnoxious mexican trapped in a 30 lb body. No joke. She like adapted my personality, it is very funny.
Now even with all of the incredible strides Jesse has taken, there are still issues. Jesse wears special splints on her legs, which she must wear all day long, and every day, probably til she is 18. They are basically like plastic casts up to her knee. They make everything harder for her, but I don’t baby her, I push her harder to work harder so she doesn’t give up on things that are tough for her. I do help by buying her a special scooter she can ride (she now can ride a normal scooter), special tricycle she can peddle, etc. But she blows me away every day. She has the GANAS (guts, desire, determination) to work harder. I have had a goal for the last 2 years, to get this kid wakesurfing, and specifically by this season. We are almost there, and today on Lake Almanor I saw the light at the end of the tunnel. I KNOW it will happen this season now, and I am so excited. You can watch the video to see what I am talking about.
I am sorry to wax on so much, but that is what wake9.com is all about. It is about our family doing something together that we love to do so much. I hope you enjoy the video, I know I enjoyed making it.
I would also like to throw a HUGE thanks again to Mike and Dennis at Walker Project for making this GROM board. I don’t think T & M would be progressing as they are without it, and I know Jesse wouldn’t have done this.
Recently we removed all but the 24Ve graphics on our Tige, to make way for the wake9.com custom graphics we had made. We have been doing a few videos with out Tige, and some friends at Tige said “You can’t tell its a Tige anymore! Where is the love?” So I said, “send us some graphics”. And they showed up a couple of days later. Very cool, huh? Well, these aren’t just any graphics, these are Sic, you must see these raised chrome graphics. Here is a few pictures.
Right Side Tige 24Ve Graphic
Rear Tige 24Ve Graphic
Rear Tige 24Ve Graphic
It is a lot of fun spending time with Larry and our kids working on the Tige in our wake9 “lab”. Here is a quick video we did of the install, and a bit of horsing around.
Feels weird to drive SOUTH to go to the Northern California wakesurfing contest in Merced. Isn’t that central cali? No worries, I am not complaining. Wake9.com is helping sponsor, and taking our entire stable of floating vehicles. The pontoon for help staging riders, the waverunners for picking riders out of the water, and the Tige to demo the new deck and Samson towers, since wake9.com is now the ONLY Samson dealer in all of NorCal, maybe even all of california. I will have to check.
Here is a picture of all of the vehicles in our front yard.
getting crowded
I had to snap this at the gas station, the tige always looks nice behind the yukon.
nice looking rig
I have no idea what whitney was trying to do with her face.
Nice FACE whitney!
We stopped for eats in Turlock, and amy snapped this out front of Chipotle. Man, that burrito hit the spot.
quite a convoy
Took this picture in the chipotle, I went for the “feelski” on greg, and um, he didn’t seem to mind.
Greg has nice ChiChis.
This is a great picture, and a great memory. Just as we were parking everything at the NOT SO Quality in in Merced, we heard an old school ice cream truck. That dude definitely made his quota for that day! He went home happy.
We got in some last minute practice this morning before heading down to Merced for the NorCal wakesufing contest. The Muniz family is going with us to merced, and at least greg and tim will be competing. Since the weather has been so bad, we haven’t been able to get them riding well on the smaller boards, but they are doing well on the mini longboard. Here are a couple pics of greg.
Whitney refers to this method, as OBGYN.
He is getting the hang of it.
The in was Time Muniz turn. He gets up a bit faster, and is a bit of a clown.
Tim starting to clown around
good pic of tim, GREAT pic of wake, so clean.
Then tbone was up. He is doing good but still learning the new board. He is used to boards that are too big for him and spreads his legs out too much, so I wanted to give him some time on the new board before the contest.
tbone can use the practice.
tbone fighting his way back in.
RJ was last. He mainly needed to practice his 3s. There was so much pollen in the air, both he and I were not on our games. RJ struggled with his 3s, but landed a few.
RJ cruisin'
not a bad lipslide
We were only out for about 3 hours, but I hope it helps the kids out.
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