Three men hurtle through the air at nearly 40 m.p.h., twisting, tumbling, turning before hitting the surface of Wonder Lake and vanishing in an explosion of spray. An anxious moment later they burst from the cloud of spray, still on their skis and waving toward shore, where a crowd lets out its collective breath and roars its approval.
“That’s the Wonder Lake team I know!” an announcer yells into an amplified microphone. “Ladies and gentlemen, those are your defending national ski jump champions!”
You don’t need to visit the Wisconsin Dells and Tommy Bartlett’s famed water ski show to see great on-the-water acrobatics. In the northwest suburbs, the Wonder Lake Water Ski Show Team and the Aquanuts of Twin Lakes, Wis., rival–many team members say they surpass–the best that Bartlett and other professional water ski shows can offer. And they do it free of charge.
In last year’s National Water Ski Show Tournament, the Aquanuts finished in fifth place. The Wonder Lake team finished sixth and its jump team contingent won the national ski jump title. Last month at the Lamb’s Farm Water Ski Show Tournament in Libertyville, Wonder Lake finished first and the Aquanuts second. The Lamb’s Farm tournament is part of water show skiing’s Triple Crown Championships, the three most prestigious water ski show tournaments.
“Ask anybody who knows competitive skiing and they’ll tell you the best teams come from the Midwest,” said Aquanuts President Michelle Cook, 38, of Union Grove, Wis. “Teams in Florida, where they can ski all year, can’t beat us. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because up here, where we can ski only three or four months a year, we make a more concentrated effort. We’re competitive in the Midwest, and because we’re so competitive, we get the best out of ourselves.”
Last year the top six teams nationally came from Illinois, Minnesota and Wisconsin. A spokesman at the American Water Ski Association in Gainesville, Fla., said there are about 75 amateur water ski show teams that compete regionally or nationally, most of them from the Midwest, New York and Florida.
The Aquanuts’ home course at Lance Park on Lake Mary in Twin Lakes is the envy of nearly every other ski team. The Twin Lakes Village Board designated the area for the Aquanuts in 1974, two years after the team was formed. An L-shaped dock gives the team an ideal platform to launch its shows, and a wooded park with bleachers that sit on a small hill overlooking the lake gives spectators a beautiful place to watch the performances.
On this night, someone in bib overalls struts along the dock, clowning with the team’s announcer. On the water behind him a ski boat roars by at nearly 50 m.p.h. It’s dragging something across the water, sending up a huge plume of silvery spray. A dark figure takes shape inside the spray. It’s a skier who took off lying face down with the ski tow rope wrapped around one foot! He’s finally up, skiing backward–on bare feet–in a spray so thick you begin to wonder how he can breathe.
The clown and the backward barefoot ski routine help tell the story of “Earl,” a comical doofus who’s trying to spoil the fun of young skiers who have begun using his favorite fishing hole “Bumble Bay.”
Water ski show teams add drama or comedy to their shows by developing a story that weaves in the on-the-water action with music and a narration. The Aquanuts became the first team in the nation to do this in 1975, and now they all do this.
Sure, it’s campy, but it works.
“We’re very proud of the record we’ve compiled over the years,” said the Aquanuts’ Cook. “We’ve won the Triple Crown Championships back-to-back–the only team that’s ever done that.” The team also holds several other national water ski show titles.
Cook was perhaps the team’s best skier during its Triple Crown years of 1983 and 1984. A horseback riding accident in 1986 left her paralyzed from the waist down, but that hasn’t stopped her from helping with the team. In addition to being president, she also helps coach the junior team and helps design and sew team costumes.
And this year she’s back on the water. She has learned to hang glide and plans to take part in some shows by hang gliding behind a boat.
“The team has been a big part of my life,” she said. “I had watched the team ski and worshiped the ground they walked on. I started dating a guy on the team who literally threw me in the water, had somebody throw me a rope and said, `Ski.’ I skied. That was in 1979, and I’ve been involved ever since.”
Peace returns to Bumble Bay as Earl comes to realize he and the skiers can share the waters. A crowd of about 300 people applauds the aquatic morality play and then begins to roar at the Tail Walk, the Aquanuts’ show finale and the signature of boat driver Brian Schaufel, 37, of Twin Lakes.
Schaufel, a five-time national champion ski boat driver, guns twin 225-horsepower engines on a 21-foot Hydrodyne ski boat, standing the boat nearly straight up on its stern. He heads for the crowd before gently bringing the boat down. The show ends, and kids rush out of the stands to the show dock for autographs.
As spectacular as the move is, it’s Schaufel’s ability to work with the skiers that makes him a champion boat driver. “A good show driver has consistent patterns, a smooth rhythm and holds the proper speeds,” Schaufel said. “He keeps the show flowing and works well with the skiers. If you know when to back off the throttle and how much, you can save some skiers from falling. And if a skier goes down, a good driver can come back and pick him up without disturbing the flow of the show, which picks up points for the team.”
In competition, every aspect of a show gets judged: skiers, boat drivers, team announcers, costumes, creativity of theme and story line. Even dock workers get scored. Teams must complete 14 routines in one hour, and each routine demands different ropes, handles and skis. Jump skis, for instance, are different from swivel skis, which have a binding that allows a skier to do 360-degree turns. Dock workers need to have the necessary equipment ready to keep the show flowing. By the time a show is over, dock workers will have handled about 15,000 feet of rope. If dock workers go unnoticed, they’re doing their jobs well.
Back at Wonder Lake, the show is flowing. Several hundred people stretched out on blankets or sitting on folding lawn chairs applaud the defending national ski jump champions. The jumpers are doing front somersaults, back somersaults, 360-degree helicopter spins and other maneuvers off a floating ramp that ends 5 1/2 feet above the water, launching the skiers about 10 feet into the air at the peak of the jumps.
The crowd goes wild at the Quarantine, which features five skiers behind one boat. Three of them go off the floating ski jump and spin 360 degrees in the air while the two outside skiers go around the jump and cross beneath the airborne skiers, who land between them.
A few minutes later, more than 40 skiers are on the water at once. A group of Strap Doubles skiers goes by. Strap Doubles features a man and a woman on one set of skis, the man on the bottom with a strap connected to the tow rope around his waist. This enables him to hold the woman over his head. Team announcer and show co-director Jim Lasky tells the crowd they’re watching the “Arrow Formation,” and it’s a good description.
Now a Trio Line goes by, groups of two men and one woman. The men are on their own pairs of skis and hold the woman over their heads. The women are lying on their backs, their legs straight out and their arms extended out, as if they’re flying upside down.
The crowd has also seen Wake-Boarders, acrobats who do airborne flips by leaping up and over a ski boat’s wake; a Ballet Line, two dozen or so young women making graceful synchronized moves with their arms, legs and hands; and Swivel Skiers, women who use one ski with a special binding that enables them to spin in full circles.
The big finish is the single biggest maneuver on the water, the building of a four-high human pyramid flanked by three-high pyramids–24 skiers on 12 pairs of skis. The skiers take off from a dock with the pyramid partly built. Skiers on the bottom use one hand to hold the tow rope and lay their free hand on the shoulder of the skier next to them. This forms a base for people on the higher levels. The person at the top of the four-high pyramid stands some 20 feet in the air as the pyramid bounces across the choppy water at almost 20 m.p.h.
“In a lot of ways, I think our shows are more exciting than the professional shows,” said Bob Hartmann, 31, a 17-year Wonder Lake ski team veteran, this year’s show co-director and a former professional skier at Sea World and at Six Flags in Florida. “At the professional shows, we had only 15 people on the whole staff. There’s no way the professional teams can afford to put the number of people on the water that we do, and that makes what we do pretty impressive.”
Each team has about 50 skiers on its senior team. The Wonder Lake team also has 32 junior skiers, youngsters about 7 to 13 years old. The Aquanuts have 15 junior team skiers.
On both teams, entire families help out. Consider Wonder Lake’s Hartmanns. Bob and his brother Bill were among the nine Wonder Lake jumpers who won last year’s national ski jump title. Bob’s wife, Tami, is one of the club’s featured skiers. Bob’s sister Patti, who has been on the team nearly 25 years, no longer skis but serves as club president. Other brothers, sisters, nieces and nephews–a total of one dozen Hartmanns–are on the team.
The Wonder Lake team may be unique in that its members must come from the neighborhoods that surround the lake. Other teams draw members from a wide area. The Aquanuts draw from Twin Lakes, about 15 miles from Wonder Lake on the Illinois-Wisconsin line, and also from as far away as Milwaukee and Chicago.
“We’re a community team, and we take a lot of pride in representing Wonder Lake,” Patti Hartmann said. “We have great sponsors and great community support, which we appreciate very much.”
The Wonder Lake team got its start about 40 years ago when a few of the locals started showing off on their skis. For most of the team’s history, it skied only on Wonder Lake. About eight years ago team members decided to ski elsewhere, including in regional and national competitions. The team practices at a private beach in the Wonder Woods subdivision on the west side of the lake and performs at Wonder Center Beach on the lake’s east side.
Both teams started planning for this year’s routines last fall. By winter, they were indoors practicing building human pyramids and working on ballet moves and on-shore dance routines.
Skiers and boat drivers may grab the glory, but dozens of people on each team work behind the scenes to line up sponsors, organize fundraisers, sew costumes, maintain equipment and take care of other chores. One of those people is Jim Ruck of Twin Lakes, the Aquanuts’ equipment adviser and a building construction and metalworking teacher at Westosha Central High School in Paddock Lake, Wis. His sons Erik, 15, and Mark, 12, are both Aquanuts skiers.
Ruck designed the team’s portable floating ski jump and cajoled his building construction classes into building it and the team’s show dock, which has one leg extending about 130 feet along the shore and the other leg extending 80 feet out.
“The Aquanuts have been great for my kids,” Ruck said. “Last year my younger son had the leading role in the school play, and I know that if he weren’t involved with the team and used to getting in front of groups of people, he never would have done something like that. It’s part of our life, being an Aquanut.”
The Wonder Lake team is also a big part of life for Skip and Sherry Sorensen of Wonder Lake and their daughters Holly, 16, and Melanie, 11. Skip, the team’s vice president, does a lot of behind-the-scenes work, including maintaining boats and equipment. Holly skis on the senior team and coaches the junior team, whose members include Melanie. Sherry handles release-line duties during shows, riding in a boat that pulls skiers and releasing the ropes of skiers who fall. Her biggest job, though, is helping to design, sew and repair team costumes.
“It takes me about five hours to finish each of these costumes,” she said as she held up a green outfit with sequins, “and I’ve got 18 to make. That’s just for one routine, and we have 14 routines. I don’t know how many hundreds of hours we spend working on costumes.
“Everyone who’s involved with the team makes a big commitment. It’s a lot of work, but it’s a lot of fun, too. And who knows; we may bring back a national championship.”
CATCH THE ACTION
Here’s where you can see the Aquanuts and the Wonder Lake Water Ski Show Team:
The Aquanuts perform at 6 p.m. Wednesdays and Saturdays (except Aug. 10) at Lance Park, on Highway County O, Twin Lakes, Wis. The team’s final show is scheduled for Aug. 31.
The Wonder Lake team performs at Wonder Center Beach, on Hancock Drive on the east side of the lake, Wonder Lake. Shows are scheduled for 7 p.m. July 26 and Aug. 2 and 4 p.m. Sept. 1. The team also will perform Sept. 8 at Crystal Lake’s Main Beach.
Both teams and other top teams will be competing at this year’s National Ski Show Tournament Aug. 9-11 in Rockford.
