Back to Dave's Adventures
Back to Dave's page...
"Welcome OSU!"
I have a knack for this, it seems. I've visited Geauga Lake with the United Auto Workers and with the Cleveland Clinic Foundation. I've visited both Kennywood and Idlewild on Giant Eagle day. At Kennywood I've also met the United Mine Workers, and Bayer. I can't forget about Saturn Owners Appreciation Day at Cedar Point, or the Christian Music Festival at Darien Lake, or the Boy and Girl Scouts at Kings Island. This time I did it again. I managed to pick the day when the World's Smallest Six Flags Park would play host to the World's Largest University.
Well, I got to the park in mid-afternoon. I started with a ride on the Sea Dragon, which required a very long wait. Operationally, the Sea Dragon can't handle a big crowd very well. A single operator parks the train in unload, individually unloads the four cars, rolls the train down to load, crosses the track to let the next 16 people through, crosses the track to individually load the four cars, then lets the brake out to dispatch the train. Then a minute later he starts the process over again. Part of the problem with this is the lap bars. Each car has a foot-pedal on the operator side to release the bars, so each car has to be indvidually unloaded. Once open, the bars tend to fall down and frequently to re-lock either as riders are exiting or as the train is being moved from unload to load. So as a practical matter the cars usually have to be individually loaded as well. I wouldn't be at all shocked to learn that the train is 46 years old (It's an early model of the Scooby Doo train; did PTC build them with hinged lap bars in '56?), and I should be happy that there is no solenoid box to bash my shins on. But when the park is busy a second operator could probably cut the load/unload time for this ride in half and do something about the crowd spilling over the Canoochee Creek bridge. Trouble is, where could they find another operator when they need all the help they have? And most of the time there isn't enough of a wait for the coaster to make the extra labor worthwhile. On this day, though, they needed anything to deal with this crowd. Once aboard, of course, the Sea Dragon was its usual self: Everything the Beastie at Kings Island ought to be, a smooth-running brakeless junior coaster. Sea Dragon may not look like much, but as I pointed out to my fellow riders, it is the highest, longest, steepest, fastest wooden roller coaster in all of Delaware county. In fact, it's the biggest wooden coaster in a 90-mile radius!
Instead of waiting in that long line for another coaster ride, I opted to visit the water park, which I had (deliberately, due to weather) missed on my previous visit. I waded into the wave pool and swam into the teeming mass of humanity that filled it. The water came up to my neck. I could barely fit between the tubes. I rolled over and kept right on going, amazed that I hadn't encountered a rope yet. The crowd thinned just a little as I got further out. Last year it didn't matter how crowded the wave pool got, the "stop here" rope was set at about the 6' depth. Today the rope was clear out at the 8' mark, leaving lots of water deep enough to swim in. With a crowd of this size they needed every inch of it. I picked a spot and started treading water (remember I'm in well over my head here!), waiting for the wave action to begin. Wyandot Lake's wave pool is perhaps the most extreme wave pool I have ever experienced, first of all because the water does get deep enough to swim in. Second, from the surface of the water to the deck surrounding the pool the retaining wall is about 4' high. Once the wave cycle starts, the water level comes to within inches of the deck, sometimes even spilling over slightly. It's a continuous action pool with waves almost big enough to surf on. The crowd was way too thick to do this today without getting hurt, but one of my favorite tricks in this pool is to get over near the right-hand side at the point where the wall breaks outward for the shallow part of the pool. The water is about 42" deep there, a bit shallow for swimming when the wave trough hits, but it's okay. Anyway, taking a leaping start into an oncoming wave at that point, it's possible to swim over the crest of the wave, but because it is propogating in the opposite direction, you (or at least I...) end up out-swimming the crest and dropping down the back-side of the wave. To put that into the language of this forum, in this particular wave pool, it is very possible to experience airtime!
I only lasted through the one wave cycle. I think the most tiring part isn't the seven minutes with the waves going, it's the treading water for fifteen minutes between wave cycles! Besides, they were going to empty the pool for the last fifteen minutes of the hour anyway so I opted to beat the rush for Canoochee Creek, the park's lazy river. I've found that if I sit on the bottom of the Creek, the water level almost comes up to my nose, which is just about perfect...I can reach down on either side and push off the bottom with my fingertips to kind of go with the flow, as it were. I went halfway around and exited at the main midway, then hiked across the scorching asphalt and across the bridge to Christopher's Island. Christopher's Island is a very large lagoon which is home to a pirate ship with slides for kids to play on, a climbing structure for kids to play on, and a gigantic SCS treehouse with a dumping bucket on top for the whole family to climb on. I wandered around the back side and watched the kiddies getting drenched. It's interesting to watch the people standing in front of the treehouse under the dumping bucket. They are standing there specifically because they know they are going to get a few hundred gallons of water dumped on them, but as the bucket is about to dump they all assume this really confused looking stance where they look like they can't make up their mind whether they want to go through with it or not. A great place to watch this is from a balcony on the second level of the treehouse. That spot is directly in front of the dumping bucket, but beneath the corrugated metal roof that the bucket actually dumps on, so it's actually not in the line of fire, as it were.
I crossed back over to Canoochee Creek and completed my circuit. Seeing really long lines for the tube slides, I opted instead to grab my shirt and shoes and return to the main ride park. Rides on the Scrambler and Spider and Frolic led me to realize that the Frolic slings grease out of its upper bearing when you spin the tubs really fast. 8-) Hey, at least there's grease in there!
Of course I ended up in the long line for the coaster and took a few rides to end my evening. The line stayed long especially after the waterpark closed. It was just too nice of a day for people to want to leave right away. So I didn't get quite as many coaster rides as I often might, but I got a few. It was a good way to end the evening, and to end my week-long illness-induced coaster riding hiatus.
--Dave Althoff, Jr.
Back to the 2002 Park Visits index
Back to Dave's Adventures
Back to Dave's page...
