I’m anxiously waiting for the Madison lakes to melt so I can get my boat in the water for that first run of the year. The weather hit near 50 here today, which will work some wonder on that sheet of ice covering Lake Monona.

The 2010 Barefoot Worlds kick off this coming Saturday at the Beetzsee Rowing Course in Brandenburg-an-der-Havel near Berlin, Germany. The rowing course has seats for 5,000 spectators and has held as many as 10,000 people. The event runs from Saturday, August 7th thru Sunday, August 15th. Now I’ve never been to Berlin or Germany, but I know lots of people who have, and everyone of them says you can have a ton of fun over there. Plus, they are bound to have some really good beer, and of course really good beer gardens.

By now, many of the participants are likely there, on their way there, or about to leave. To everyone, I wish you all save travels, and of course, good luck in the event.

I’ve read through some of their newsletters (yep, they send them to me) and they are expecting huge crowd for the event, which will be awesome to see for a barefoot tournament.

I’ll do my best to cover the event from 4400 miles away, but I will admit to a conflict on the final weekend of the event… I’ll be competing in the National Show Ski Championships, so my ability to keep close tabs on the event will be hampered that final weekend, but I’ll still do my best. I’ll use the full resources of the interweb to cover the event. There is the significant time difference from there to here, so hopefully I’ll be able to use that to my advantage.

And if you happen to be heading over there and want to be a correspondent for Tales from the Foot, let me know by sending an email to wedge [at] talesfromthefoot.com. Or if you just a picture or two, send them my way.

For more scores, you can check out the full USA Water Ski Press Release and at least for the time being, you can find all of the scores here (via the ABC website).

On a related note, I did get to watch a little bit of the webcast of this event that the World Barefoot Center did. Not the slickest production I’ve seen, but they are aware of that and are working on making it better (when I watched, there was a kid posing in the background). Yes, there were a couple small technical hick-ups, but nothing major. What I did like was the live feed from the boat to show each person’s runs. You could see exactly what the judges could see with a view right from the boat. I was only able to watch for a little bit on Saturday morning and watched a 82 year old and 75 year old do their trick runs. (I hope I’m still able to barefoot at their ages.) Swampy did a good job describing what he was seeing, estimating their scores, describing why somethings counted and why some didn’t. I give MAD PROPS to the WBC for making this happen. I’m sure they made countless peoples’ days by enabling them to watch their friends and family compete at Nationals. I can’t wait to see what they do next time.

*everywhere that publishes barefoot water skiing results

1993 Barefoot Nationals [video]

And As SacFooter always does, he shot a lot of video and put together this exclusive video for Tales from the Foot of David Small doing some footing. It features all 3 primary barefoot events with a whole lot of tricks, some solid slaloming and some inverted jumps.

David Small in Brentwood, CA [video]

Thanks for the video Roy!

Paul Stokes – 2002 Barefoot Worlds Finals Trick Run

SacFooter has the privilege to ski with Willie Farrell fairly regularly and has posted about his experiences before (link). While those of us in the midwest were suffering through a cold, windy and rainy October, they were blessed with blue skies and calm water in the Sacramento area. On one of those days SacFooter took his camera along and he’s put together a little video for us to…

Watch Willie Farrell rip up the Port of Sacramento as he puts on a clinic on how to barefoot trick and slalom.

Willie Rips the Port of Sacramento [video]

Thanks for the video SacFooter!!!

I can’t find a source to back this up, but I remember seeing a USA Water Ski post go through my RSS reader about Keith St. Onge winning gold at Worlds and I know he also won gold at Nationals as well as set a pending trick record. (article)

Here’s a link with all of the Nationals results.

Finally… a little teaser. Keep an eye on here for a pretty sweat barefoot video (or two) coming soon. Camera work kinda sucks and the view point isn’t that great, but the trick is more than kick ass and makes up for the poor camera work and bad perspective.