Hey, it’s Jim. So this is an image of me up in Long Lake, Maine, probably 17, 18 or so. So this is probably 1982, 83, 81, somewhere around there. I had so many great memories from that period of my life — only in the summertime! The rest of the year sucked But the summer times were great because we went camping, and that’s where I had my friends. I hated during the year, during school, and it was just horrible, like prison. But I was free — I was liberated during the summertime. And I had these great friends up there. And we used to go skiing.

We were very lucky. We had some boats that my father and mother provided through hard work. And we had a couple of boats. And we used to go skiing. And we got really good at it, too. Because we were young and strong and we were athletes. So this stuff came naturally.

And so we did a lot of trick skiing, skiing backwards and spinning around. We did jumps, we did hydrofoils, dog bones, slalom, regular skis. We taught dozens and dozens of people how to ski over the years. And one of the things we did is barefooting. It is really a cool thing, but the problem, we had a couple problems. First, the boat really wasn’t fast enough. My boat could only get up to about 40 miles an hour, and that just is, I mean, I’m 195 pounds there, and I was a football player, so I had a lot of muscle. I was really heavy, and 40 miles an hour is just hardly fast enough for us to do something like that because the surface area in your feet is just so small. And so, yeah, we had to actually sit on a sled and then you put your feet in the water, you go full speed, and then you just gradually stand up on the water. The process, the technique, is very easy to do. But you have to have a lot of balance and stuff and be a pretty decent athlete.

So anyway, I’m wearing sneakers here in this image and I wore sneakers most of the time because if you hit a log or something or a beer can or a Coke bottle or something in the water, you can rip your foot off, right? So I just wasn’t going to do that. So I wore sneakers. But the problem is wearing sneakers, you really can’t feel the water. And if you do purely barefoot, your toes spread out and your heels dig into the water and you can feel it and all those muscles start moving and you can move around. It’s like you stick to the water. It’s really cool. But with sneakers, it’s slippery and you really can’t feel the water and so you end up sliding all over the place.

But anyway, it was just to be a little bit safer. Yeah, no, it was great, great fun. The problem here now is when you’re at this speed, the water is actually pretty hard. So when you fall, you can fall face first most of the time. And that hurts like hell. But anyway, I’m glad I did it. It was great fun. And yeah, great memories, great friends. And that’s it.