Wetass Video Of The Week…: Meet Tim Gross, from Portland, who hucks his kayak off the 101-foot high Abqua Creek waterfall. Just your ordinary, insane huck, except it doesn’t finish quite as it started out. Or, as Gross puts it: “It was alright until I was completely upside down…” D’oh! So click here to watch (Quicktime required) what has to be a world record in the newly created category of “Kayak Huck–Inverted”…



“Uhh, Houston, I think we have a problem…”

Transat Update: After bashing through strong headwinds and rain for the first day, the 36 skippers (there has been one retirement, a 60-foot tri that had a daggerboard snap off) of the singlehanded transat race got a brief respite as they sailed through a ridge of high pressure off Ireland. The racing is intense (click here for reports), with the two lead trimarans match racing each other through the night, just 200 meters apart. Here’s how Thomas Coville on Sodebo, described the experience of racing through the dense fog the fleet encountered:

“A strange atmosphere, like sailing through soft cotton. The feeling of speed is intense… with nothing visual to register on [there has been under 300m visibility] except our wake, we seemed to be flying along in 14-15 knots of wind and a gentle, long swell.”

Most of the skippers have survived on just a few hours of sleep, mostly in very brief naps. Here’s what race originator Blondie Hasler had to say about sleep:

“A trained singlehander can maintain full mental and physical efficiency for an unlimited number of days without ever sleeping for more than 20 minutes at a time-often only half a minute-but these catnaps must be taken at frequent intervals throughout 24 hours, and must be started as soon as he leaves port, long before he begins to feel tired.”

Uh, okay Blondie. However they do it, the skippers better get rested up, though. There is a massive depression spreading across the Atlantic, which is set to hammer the fleet later this week. Here’s the long-range forecast: carnage…



Yves Parlier’s Radical “Hydroplaneur”: “Alors, if the storm takes one mast, at least I have another…”

Transatlantic, Upwind, Alone–What’s Not To Love?: Yesterday, 37 solo sailors left Plymouth in windy, wet conditions. Ahead of them lies 3,000 miles of cold, grey ocean, as they batter their way through frontal systems, exhaustion and potential catastrophe to reach Boston. It’s called “The Transat,” and it’s the granddaddy of all solo races. Started in 1960 by an English adventurer and innovator named Blondie Hasler (who raced in a 26-foot, junk-rigged cruising boat), the first Transat took more than 40 days. It was such a compelling and nail-biting competition that it has been held every four years since, and was the precursor to the solo races which eventually took sailors around the world. Today, the boats are the best of the best, high tech 60-foot trimarans, 60-foot monohull thoroughbreds tuning up for the non-stop, round-the-planet Vendee Globe this fall, and a handful of 50-footers. The first boats should be in Boston in just over a week…that is if they don’t capsize or break down. The weather, as usual, is for sh*t, and already the skippers are exhausted from lack of sleep (Hasler claimed he perfected the art of the one-minute catnap for this race). You can follow the whole shebang here, and read the latest daily report here. There are two American skippers, Kip Stone and Joe Harris, in the 50-foot monohull fleet, who will be fun to follow. Both are amateur sailors who just said, “What the f*ck,” bought racing boats, and are now out there getting cold, getting wet, and probably wondering what the hell they were thinking…



Transat Trimaran: “Whoa, Momma. Note to self: the manual advises that it’s important to keep at least part of the boat in the water at all times…”

TWC Quick Hits…:

Deadly Piranhas May Have Been Dumped Into Bangkok Waterways: Men who plan to swim are warned to, err, “cover” themselves well…

California Surfer Survives Great White Nibble Attack: Researchers interested in examining incredibly skanky wetsuit…

French Police Smash Frog Poaching Network: Huge operation nets restaurateurs and a whole lot of 12-year old boys. In other news, experts wonder why Al Qaeda is thriving…



“I’m as willing as the next frog to go undercover, but that wire totally messed up my croak…”

Annals of Achievement–Everest North Central Face Climbed: Over the weekend, while we were all grilling hot dogs and drinking beer, the Russian climbers on Everest pulled off the climb of the decade, getting to the top of the world via the brutal unclimbed rock wall that guards Everest’s north face. They were the last climbers on the mountain, and the last meters required superhuman effort. At 8600 meters, just when the lead group thought they had knocked the bastard off, the climbers were faced with a very difficult step of Grade 6 (which translates as “f*cking difficult”) rock. They desperately tried to climb it, so they could summit and get down, but it was too hard. SO they had to spend not one, but TWO nights at 8600 meters…without sleeping bags. Oh yeah, they were also running out of oxygen and had to turn their bottles down to minimal flow. Conditions were about as harsh as Stalin’s worst Siberian gulag, but instead of backing off these guys just sucked it up and kept pressing. And on Sunday all the pain and frustration paid off, when they finally got to the top (and quickly hightailed it down the other side, using the easy classic route to get down fast). Another team of Russians hit the summit the next day, pulling off the first June summit in Everest history. According to Explorer’s Web this is the first clean, new route on Everest in 20 years. The only question is: the Russians survived the North Central Face, but will they survive their own victory party…?



“Leapin’ Lenin, this mountain is cold. That vodka tanker better be backed up to base camp when we get down…”

Have A Wetass Weekend…



(Photo by Ben Chandler via WetDawg)

It’s A Cruel, Cruel World–Especially If You Are A Gray Whale Calf: Monterey Bay is a beautiful, undulating body of water. It also features a deep-water canyon which gray whales migrating from Baja to Alaska must cross on their annual pilgrimage. This is a geographic note that seems to have become well understood by the ever crafty Orca, or killer whale. The result is that Monterey Bay is transformed every Spring into “Ambush Alley,” a grisly tableau in which normally uplifting, heartwarming whale-watching is turned into a brutal and grisly battle, for life and death, on the open ocean. Here, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, is the scene that Mother Nature recently served up to a boatload of surprised whale watchers, as a pack of six killer whales attacked an 8-ton gray whale calf and its mother:

“As whale watchers looked on with a mixture of awe and sadness, mother killer whales — the most experienced hunters — took turns ramming head- first, like 6-ton torpedoes, into the calf’s soft underbelly, their force nearly knocking it out of the water, while others leapt atop the 20-foot baby, trying to drown it.

“It’s the greatest predation event on Earth,” said Richard Ternullo, a killer whale researcher and co-owner of Monterey Bay Whale Watch, who witnessed the battle during one of the company’s daily whale watching tours. “It’s 100 tons of whales crashing together.”

The battle lasted two and a half hours, and the excited squeals of the killer whales eventually drew in a total of 17 Orcas. But they were battling one tough Momma gray whale. Fighting valiantly to protect her calf she eventually led the bruised and bleeding baby into shallow water, where the Orcas would not venture. Fifteen other calves haven’t been so lucky. But read the whole article. It’s full of amazing information about the intelligence and adaptability of California’s killer whales. There must be a movie in here somewhere…



Orca vs. Gray Whale Smack-Down: It’s not looking good for the kid, who’s trying to find safety on his mother’s back…

Annals of Eccentricity–Shoot ‘Em Up: The American love affair with guns knows no bounds. But to experience a true orgy of firearms–outside of the gang life in major urban areas–you have to check in with the Single Action Shooting Society out in Yorba Linda, Ca. Boasting 60,000 members, the SASS is where cowboy wannabes go to dress up in vintage cowboy gear and blast away with vintage American guns…lots and lots of guns. Everyone gets a badge and a nickname (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is a member and goes by the moniker of “Trinidad Slim”). Why do they do this? The LA Times’ Christopher Reynolds goes to find out, and turns in a great feature that tries to get to the bottom of yet another charismatic American subculture:

“All of this makes the unarmed among us marvel. Never mind the psychology of that first gun. What is there in the second or third or 300th to love so much? What is it about cowboys? What turns a lawman into an outlaw? And what am I doing here, squeezing off shots under a midday sun? I draw one .357 from the right holster, another from the left. Then I grab, load and fire a rifle, and then a 110-year-old Winchester lever shotgun, its metal hot as a griddle. The gun smoke curls, the shells dance in the dirt.”

Reynolds meets pistol-packin’ Molly McRuger, “Graybeard” Itchkawich, and a guy named “Coyote Bait.” He blasts away with a pistol, rifle and shotgun, and impresses himself by hitting 27 out of 30 targets in 205 seconds. Until a man named (of course) “Tex” steps up and, the shots ringing out like “keystrokes from a touch typist,” knocks the same targets down with the same guns in just 45 seconds. Gulp. I wonder what ‘ol Tex does for a day job…



Molly McRuger: How would you like to wake up and find this woman cooking your eggs…?

(Photo: LA Times/Chris Reynolds)

Wetass Gear Garage–EasyGlider: F*ck the Segway. It’s too complex, too heavy, and too expensive. Typical American overengineering. And when you want precise engineering, who do you go to? The Swiss, of course. So if you are so damn lazy that you can’t bother to walk anywhere anymore, the folks in lederhosen have just the thing for you (due out in October): the EasyGlider, which is basically a big electric wheel that weighs just 22 kilograms, can travel up to 35 kilometers on a single charge, and will cost around $1000. You just strap on your in-line skates, hop on your skateboard, or use the EasyGlider wheeled platform (not shown), and off you go. No word on the top speed yet, or cornering ability. But I can already see the Segway-EasyGlider Death Match in which two obese lazy-assess try to knock each other down, or race their personal transporters from Paris to Dakar…



“The only problem with this thing is that there is no place to hang fuzzy dice…”

(Thanks to Tricia Weight, TWC Assistant Editor (Oddball Inventions/Morale), for the tip)

TWC Quick Hits…:

Wild Manatee Orgy In Florida Bay Attracts Gawkers And Causes Massive Traffic Jam: “They’re not that social usually.” Ashcroft takes time off from war on terror to launch investigation …

Territorial Swans Shock Town By Killing Dogs: Drown two little yappers before canines bring in Rottweiler to try and even the score…

Scientists Discover Sticky Hippo Sweat Acts As Perfect Natural Sunscreen And Anti-Bacterial Agent: Hollywood celebs already seen driving baby hippos home in their SUVs…



“This is such a great gig. I lie around in the mud, and every half hour Angelina Jolie gets naked and rubs her body all over me…”