Image of the Week: Splashdown
What goes up, must come down—and sometimes hard. Photo courtesy/copyright Tim Sharkey/Sharkey Images.
Ride in a stand-up V-bottom long enough in rough water and you develop a good sense of what’s about to happen and, if you’re smart, springy knees. You learn to unweight at the moment of impact. You learn to hang onto grab handles in a way that’s firm, but no so tight that you develop blisters on the soft skin between your thumbs and forefingers. If the seas are regular, you can even develop a rhythm that makes skipping from one big swell to the next delightful.
And then there’s this—a landing so hard that it buckles your knees just to look at it.
Above is the landing shot from last week’s “Image of the Week: In Flight With No Movie,” captured in sequence by photographer Tim Sharkey. Below is the boat in flight, moments before splashdown.
The big-air thrill before the landing. Photo courtesy/copyright Tim Sharkey/Sharkey Images.
Two things worth noting in the landing image: The displacement of water at the stern of the boat—the Cigarette emblem on the hull is completely obscured by whitewater. Second, the boat landed on another big swell, and is getting ready to launch again.
So the wild ride wasn’t over for the folks in this Cigarette. Not by a long shot.
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