DAY 1: Saturday
My skims: 13
Wriggler’s skims: 9 (!)
Days to becoming world champion: 38
Perfect conditions. No wind. Top day.
The first day of the big world-championship attempt.
Where we skim is on a couple of empty housing blocks next to the Clarry River. One block is covered in weeds. The other’s got an old falling-down house on it.
The river is so muddy that it’s brown, not blue. And the mud really stinks at low tide.
A few boats go up and down the river, mainly old guys fishing or water-skiers going past. They are coming from the coast, where the river is deeper and wider. Down there, the houses are bigger and nicer and the people are richer and younger. Out here in Pensdale, the houses are made out of fibro and wood and the people are poorer and older. On a hot day Pensdale is like a sauna.
Elite sportspeople need to warm up. Before we started Wrigs and I did some leg stretches, neck rolls and half-a-dozen one-handed pushups. Well, I did the push-ups. Wrigs just lay on the ground doing his best impression of an oversized red-headed blue-tongue lizard.
If you want to be a world champion rock skimmer, it’s important to find the right stone to skim with. You need the flattest one you can find. It should fit in between your thumb and your index finger. To skim, you peg it sidearm, as hard as you can, and see how many times you can make it bounce across the top of the water. The trick is to throw it as flat as possible so, by the time it hits the water, it’s still flying flat. That’s what makes it skip along the surface instead of sinking.
On my first throw I got thirteen skims. This world record is going to be a cinch.
Wriggler tried out a new technique. Every time he released a stone he grunted like a tennis player. He started with a simple ‘Aagggh!’ Then he moved onto ‘Aaoooeeee-ah!’ Then, ‘Graa-aa-ee-agh!’
He said that yelling sucked all the air out of his lungs and pushed the strength to his arms. He could be right because that’s how he got his record.
Just as he let go of his eighth throw he yelled so loud I thought my eardrums would burst. He also let out the hugest fart you’ve ever heard. He got nine skims. I fell over laughing.
If he perfects the grunt’n’ fart technique he’ll get to fifty-two skims and become world champion instead of me.
The rock skimming attempt is not our first crack at a world record. We tried for a different one a few years ago when I was eight. Eight years, three hundred and sixty-four days, twenty-three hours, fifty-nine minutes and fifty-nine seconds to be exact.
I had worked out that I was going to be the world’s oldest eight-year-old. I had to be. A second later and I would be nine. It would be impossible to be any older and still be eight.
I was born at 4.38 in the afternoon. On my ninth birthday Wriggler borrowed his mum’s camera and a digital clock. We worked out what the delay was between Wriggler pressing the button and the camera taking the photo.
We had to time it perfectly for the record attempt to work. I stood looking at the camera, holding the clock close to my face so you could read the time. At precisely 4.37.58 and a half Wriggler took the photo and I smiled. Then he took another one, just to be sure.
And it worked. The first picture was of my grinning face next to the clock, which said: 4.37.59. I was the world’s oldest eight-year-old. In the next photo the clock said: 4.38.00.
Wriggler said, ‘Look at the times. The first photo shows the world’s oldest eight-year-old and the second one shows the world’s youngest nine-year-old. That’s two records.’
Guinness World Records have never got back to me.