Jet Skiing in some time off in Florida

I am currently on a plane flying from Miami International Airport to LAX. My flight was at 3:30 this afternoon which allowed me a couple of hours off this morning in Florida near where I had been testing the last few days at Homestead. The team is staying to do another day of testing tomorrow on the oval and knowing that they would have a free day, one of the team put his stand up Jet Ski into the team transporter. A few of the team’s engineers and mechanics live near or on lakes and reservoirs in Indianapolis so they are mostly water proficient and have plenty of toys. They knew a place where they had been ‘skiing’ before and I got to spend a couple hours hanging out at the ‘lake’ before I left. I put ‘lake’ in quotation marks because I think it was a limestone quarry that has since filled with water. So it isn’t huge, but still plenty big enough to have a lot of fun on! I have never ridden a stand up 'Ski' before and typically I think of snow and hot chocolate when people say ‘ski’, so I was looking forward to the chance to try it out. Here’s the video of my last run before changing and rushing to the airport to catch my flight:



As a final note, the Australian voice that comments right at the end of the video. “You’re doing good, Chuck,” is that of Tim Neff, chief engineer at Sam Schmidt Motorsports, who is a very successful professional jet-ski racer in his own right. In fact he had won a professional money race the previous Sunday in Ft. Lauderdale and is also a Jet-Ski World Champion.

On another final note, riding that stand up, even for the 20 minutes or so that I did, made me sore! My palms are tired for holding onto it and my calves are tired from leaning into the turns and trying to get the ski to do what I wanted. It may not be as cold as skiing (or snowboarding) but it sure is as hard a work!