“We sort of dove out of our beach chairs, because we literally thought he was going to crash into the beach.”
It seems that the dangers, associated with our beloved pastime of surfing, have grown exponentially in recent. Once, the only terrors came from sharks or the pointy tip of the surfboard. The latter was worked around via Nose Guard Hawaii. The former rare enough to push back into the recesses and forget.
Simpler times.
Today, Nose Guard Hawaii seems out of business, putting pointy surfboard tip disaster back in play, sharks are attacking everything everywhere all at once and have recruited other “sea creatures,” not one in the burgeoning adult learner class has learned to duck-dive or turtle-roll making traumatic brain injury a 50/50 on any given day, quicksand is back in a big way and stunt pilots are dive bombing lineups in small airplanes for kicks.
The latest dive bomb incident occurred in South Carolina where beachgoers and surfers were all enjoying a warm late-May day when death lurked from above. Horrified, surfers dove underwater while beachgoers leapt from their beach chairs.
“[The pilot] turned and he just sort of zeroed in on us like he was dive bombing, and just started straight for us, so close,” one said.
That pilot, William Roger Williamson III, claimed he was not trying to show off but rather ice got on one of the plane’s carburetors and he was trying to sort it out but accidentally popped a control knob off that caused the wild dip.
A Federal Aviation Administration investigator, though, did not believe the story and Williamson had to turn himself in, charged with “breach of peace, aggravated in nature.”
Once, I piloted a submarine at Disneyland back when that ride was cool 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea themed, not silly Finding Nemo. I was told, during training, never to kill the engine because the submarine could not be restarted in situ and would have to be pulled off line, thereby shuttering the ride for hours. One hot summer day, the temptation grew too much and I slammed it while in the cave where the giant squid lives. It took roughly an hour and a half to tow the submarine off line and another few hours to get it all going again.
I claimed ignorance on what happened and was given the benefit of doubt, my maleficence must have been unprovable unlike Williams’ ice and faulty knob tale.
Whew.