WaterSki Magazine

WATERSKI Magazine
2001-06-14 15:00:00 | 68 views | 2 Comments

It was so unbelievable, this water skiing plot in

Iceland, that we just had to show the evidence.

Photos by Willy Bogner



You couldn't ask for better water. Flat as a wrestling mat, deep as the earth's crust and with no other boats within 100 miles. You'd take one hard look and dot your shirt with drool. Then you'd notice the white-capped mountain peaks popping out of the water. About seven stories high and as long as football fields, you'd realize that the hovering towers are slick as … ice, and that they are not, in fact, mountains, but ice … bergs. You'd sense that you're not in northern California, but in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, on the fringe of water skiing's version of Hades, a country we know as Ice … land.

Only in your dreams, right?

It was no dream for former Canadian national snow ski and water ski champion Gary Athans, when in midsummer of 1993 he found himself on an all-too-real glacier-formed lake off the North Atlantic in that very nation of Iceland. There to do water-skiing stunt work for the movie White Magic, Athans says that these surroundings were so real that every day he could see and hear massive icebergs falling around him. Here he was trying to do tumble-turns in 25-degree water and he had to tangle with the possibility of a 10-ton block of ice dropping him like Wyle E. Coyote.

When White Magic came out in Europe, Athans' 10-day surreal experience was cut down to a five-minute segment in which the lead character, played by Canadian actor John Eaves, dreams of wooing a snow bunny with skiing bravado. In the movie theaters it's all a dream. But to Athans, Eaves and the film crew, it was reality.



(Editor's Note: Cinematographer Willy Bogner, who produced White Magic, has earned credits for producing snow skiing segments in several James Bond movies. White Magic has only been shown in Austria, Switzerland and Germany. As of December there were no plans for an American release.)