Loo loo, skip your skidoo; loo, loo, sink your skidoo...

Two nights ago, after dinner, we were sitting down on the couch talking when we started to hear the sound that is ever present in the winter- skidoos. Even though we are in the Arctic, it is summer right now, with open water an no ice or snow. So, the sound of skidoos is a bit of an oddity mid-July, but then again, not really. Before I moved to the north, I had never seen or heard of people "skipping" skidoos. This is common practice up here, despite the fact that the stakes are high (you could sink your skidoo, which is your only means of transportation during the 8 or 9 months of winter).

Skipping skidoos involves driving them at high speed across the water, and in Tuk is most commonly done on the Harbour. From what I can tell, you need a relatively good skidoo to do this, because you need to be travelling at a consistently high speed, which an old junker probably couldn't do. So we're talking about $10,000+ machines here.

So the "skidooer" starts on land, and drives the skidoo at high speed across the water, until he reaches land somewhere on the other side. This generally works fine, until you hit a wave, or run over your own wake, and the skidoo loses it momentum or balance on the water, and begins to sink. Therefore, the travel across the water, is much like a sea-doo... however, as we all know, a skidoo does not float. So if the skidooer doesn't make it to a piece of dry land, the machine ends up at the bottom of the Harbour.

Back to the other night. We were sitting talking, when we heard the skidoos, and I heard the sound of a skidoo travelling at full speed, and suddenly it began to slow down and stop. But it didn't sound close enough to the shore across from our place, so we jumped up to see, and sure enough, the skidoo that had been travelling across the water was well on it's way down to the bottom of the Harbour. And from what I've been told, the Harbour isn't that shallow in the area where it sank, maybe 18 feet.

So we got out my binoculars, and saw the skidooer swimming to shore (they wear life jackets), but we decided we had to find out more about what happens when the skidoo sinks. We went over to the community dock, and joined the crowd that had gathered to watch, and to help get the skidoo out.

Apparently when these people skip their skidoos, they have a long rope with a buoy attached to the end of it, so that when the skidoo sinks, they have a marker for where the skidoo is, at the bottom of the Harbour, and also so that they have a rope with which to drag it back to shore. So, a boat goes out to the buoy, someone grabs onto the rope, and they slowly start to drag the sunken skidoo back to shore. Once close enough to the dock, the rope is handed off to about 10 people who then proceed with a sort of tug-of-war with the skidoo, and drag it in further. This works well in theory, unless the rope breaks, as it did in this case. Then... you just leave the skidoo until you can figure out a better way of getting it. (I saw them out there last night again trying to "hook" the remaining broken piece of rope to try to get the skidoo... but I really think this one is not going to be recovered).

Here are some pictures of the rescue efforts (I'm keeping them small so they'll load faster for my dial-up family):









In the mean time, might as well skip some more skidoos. So here is the photo sequence of how a skidoo is skipped, and subsequently sunk (2 in one night! great entertainment!):


















And the sinking begins...


Going...


going...


gone!

This is better than reality television, I tell you!