“Australia Day” was a month ago and people are still calling in sick from the hangovers. What once was the official “National Day of Australia” to celebrate the anniversary of the 1788 arrival of the First Fleet of British Ships at Port Jackson, New South Wales, and the raising of the Flag of Great Britain at Sydney Cove by Governor Arthur Phillip – today, Australia Day celebrates “the diverse society and landscape of the nation,” according to Wikipedia, and is noted for BBQs, beach parties and a lot of questionable behavior.
In the personal watercraft (PWC) community, one video has been making the rounds exemplifying such negligible decision making. But it bears noting that professional standup freeriders such as Mark Gomez have made a lot of headline news by performing backflips and other tricks in swimming pools. This requires a ton of skill, timing and a machine properly tuned for the close quarters. One missed entry, one slip of the throttle could spell disaster.
On January 26th, a few mates in Melbourne thought they’d celebrate Australia day in fine fashion by dragging a well-tuned and customized Sea-Doo RXP-X (dubbed “Project X”) into a friend’s pool (which had already had a dirtbike jumped into it earlier that day) and attempt to snap some turns. Unfortunately, the fiberglass Sea-Doo RXP-X made contact with the brick and concrete, smashing debris across the top of the pool. While we don’t know how the Sea-Doo’s hull fared, we can see how damaging the impact was to the pool.