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WATERSKI MagazineOutside the vague boundaries of Windermere, Florida, rubbing against the world of Disney, are clusters of orange groves. It's behind one of these groves, down at the end of a dusty two-lane dirt path that doglegs left, where a dock sits in absolute silence. On a Saturday evening you can stand on that dock, totally oblivious to the shuttle-bus fumes and wacky tourist hats on the other side of the trees, and hear fish catching mosquitoes just above the surface of the still lake. (You can also hear your palms smacking the land-lubbing mosquitoes against your ankles and neck.)
But one morning last December, that dock was buzzing with something other than insects. Shuffling between banana peels and half-empty Evian bottles, were five teens. They had flown cross-country and driven across the state line to (in this order): sit on the dock, take a quick set, then sit back down in a mass of muffin crumbs. All weekend long, and all the while showing no interest whatsoever in the fact that right over there the most popular theme park on earth was charming wallets out of pockets with kingdoms and castles. This kind of single-minded passion was why water skiing's top coaches and instructors had named them as the most likely to take water skiing's torch into an Olympic stadium sometime in the early 21st century, and it was the impetus for their recent water-skiing rendezvous.
