Week 1- Nike 6.0 killing kid of the week

So this past week was the first week of the summer, and the start of Basecamp. We had 13 campers, and they all had an awesome time. There were lots of  bails, and many new tricks learned. By the end of the week everyone was healthy and loving life. These campers were also the first to hit our brand new Nike 6.0 wallride. It was finished on Wednesday, so the campers had two days to perfect their skills, to be ready for the best trick contest. The prize was a brand new pair of Nike 6.0 shoes. The shoes were won by Jordan Long (bottom photo) by doing a switch 270 on, backlip the top, and 270 out. The Nike 6.0 killing it kid of the week goes out to Chris Sinkic (top photo), he was killing it all week long, stomping brand new tricks everywhere. So for that he received a pair of Nike 6.0 shoes. The photos and names will soon be updated on the Basecamp website. So go check that out soon. So congrats goes out to those guys. If you try hard enough maybe one day you can also become the Nike 6.0 killing it kid of the week!

Nike 6.0 wallride Installed

So it took about a week to complete but she is finally installed into our slider lake. The new Nike 6.0 wallride is ready to be shredded by the best, and also those just starting to hit sliders. Nike has yet to brand it out with their logos and designs. Soon enough they will send their artists up here, and will begin to make it look amazing. You may have noticed the windows in the side of it... they are there because soon we will add some brand new Nike shoes in there, all lit up and have a very epic nighttime photoshoot. There is so much potential for this obstacle. The photos above may not be the best quality because the session was so late in the day. But it shows the magnitude of the wallride and how awesome it is! 

So to hit this amazing new addition of the slider park, you must come to the best wakeboard facility around... Basecamp! 

Wallride Almost Finished!

We have been steadily working on this wallride for a solid week, and now we are so close to finish we can taste victory. At 32 feet in length and 12 feet high, it is a massive structure, that will be ready to ride in few more hours of work. All that needs to be done is screw the plastic top sheet to the plywood. As we speak Mr. Scott Duke is in Toronto picking up the plastic. Hopefully he can fit all of it into the not so big ford ranger, so we don't have to make two trips. Once we receive this shipment, we should be on our way to finishing the wallride. Then the only thing that needs to be done is let the Nike 6.0 artists go wild. They are going to brand it out in their own creative style. Well that was just a little update on our progress so far with the wallride. It will hopefully be ready to ride sometime this week. Should be tons of fun!

Camp starting to come together.

So with only a few days left before the first campers arrive, we are desperately running around trying to fix everything possible. Everything that we set out to do is almost done. Just a few things left to do; such as building the new Nike 6.0 wallride, and completing the bike trail, getting the trampolines together and fixing our hot tub. Slowly but surely these things will be completed. The Nike wallride is in the process of being constructed, the base has been laid out; we just need to make the top part, should be done in the next week. The wallride will be 32 feet long, 10 feet high, and an angle of about 45 degrees. It will have clear plexiglass on the top, and Nike is going to come up to the camp and create a giant mural on it; it should look amazing! The 2.5 km long bike trail is coming together, we had a long, swampy day yesterday of cutting out a new path from the slider lake to the trail on main land. It was horrible, but soon when it is all finished it will be epic. The other projects will also be finished soon. Our other staff members are starting to arrive, as exams are finishing. The summer is unofficially beginning! Its very exciting.

Show at Harbourfront Center

So this past weekend, Basecamp put on a wakeboard show in downtown Toronto, part of the Luminatio festival. It was held right on Lake Ontario at the Harbourfront center. The theme of this years festival was water; so there were many things going on in the festival. Several bands, games, activities, and of course a wakeboard show. We arrived there saturday morning, ready to tear it up. None of us expecting the amount of chop we would later deal with. We brought down our own Basecamp kicker, which had tiny wheels drilled onto the bottom of it, not the best idea to have such tiny wheels. So eventually one of them broke off, and we had to stick a skateboard under it just to get it moving. So we eventually got that into lake Ontario.

The sun was shinning and we could not have asked for a better day, just ask scott about how burnt his neck was, and he'll tell you. Even though the riders could barely stay up let alone throw down some hammers, a few tricks were landed. That day you really needed to pack a second pair of knees. But in the end the crowd was stoked, and everyone was having a blast. That is until sunday, overall pretty bad day. We once again arrived at the Harbourfront center ready. The sun was shinning brightly for the second day in a row, we were all getting ready and set up to ride. Then we started setting up the kicker in the water when we realized there was a huge storm cloud rolling in. As soon as we get one anchor in to the water, the rain starts pouring! So we decided to pack it in for the day, and not go on with the show. We had to get the boat and kicker out of the water to get ready to go home, so me (Connor) and Jon were the ones in the boat traveling at a speed of 5 mph in death waters; with waves coming from every which way at a height of around 5 feet, just covering the front of the boat. Then we got to the boat launch at Ontario Place, only to be denied access to the launch. So then we proceed to drive the boat all the way to park lawn boat launch which for you who don't know is about 10 km going at a steady pace of 9 km/h, so overall the entire journey took around an hour and a bit. Once we got to the boat launch, the worse news continued to roll in. It turns out you cant turn to tightly around corners while pulling a trailer; scott found this out the hard way. This lead to a bent axel on a brand new trailer. But its not all bad news, when we got to the boat launch we had a pizza party picnic! (PPP). But then we returned to reality and realized we could not tow a $100,000 boat on a trailer with a bent axle. We ended up leaving the boat downtown Toronto, driving the broken trailer up to Basecamp, grabbing a new trailer, and driving back down to Toronto, getting the boat and driving back up to Basecamp. This was also all this driving back and forth started at around 8 pm. Scott was the one that did all of the driving so fell bad for him, not any of the other basecamp workers, who sat around back at camp, checking facebook, eating snacks and eventually going to their cozy, warm beds. 

Overall it was great exposure for the camp, and we all had fun (on saturday).

Basecamp's annual Pig Roast!

So yesterday was a Glorious day for Basecamp and the workers of the pride marine group. It was the annual Basecamp pig roast. It started off with Scott going down to Orillia at 9am to pick up the pig from Shaw's. He then drove back to the camp, ready to chow down on some delicious pig... but it takes about 6 hours for the pig to fully cook, so he was quite disappointed. So from 11am to around 430pm the staff of Basecamp slowly cleaned up the property getting ready for the guests. As the pig was cooking, all of the staff from the marina would wonder over just to check things out, make sure everything is going good. This is probably because the smell of the pig was traveling through the air; it was hard not to come over and investigate. Several hours later, guest started to arrive and the thought of eating pig grew ever closer. Finally she was done cooking and we all got ready to dig in. The filming of the Pig Roast video, made by our filmer Adam Weir slowed things down a bit, but the video is worth the wait. It will soon be up in our video section. It portrays the epic preparation for the Roast and has a hint of a love story hidden in there...look out for it! Also a very good wakeboard/ wakeskate show put on by many people. It was a great watch. But in the end the pig was amazing and everyone had a blast. Thanks goes out to scott for everything, and everyone that showed up. Glad you guys could make it out!

See you next year!!

Jon Stasz's epic weekend

So there is a man named Jon Stasz, who is a loyal Basecamp employee. He is a very nice, funny guy, who is not very good at taking pictures. There are multiple photos of him that will make you cry they are soo funny; one day they will be released to the public. Well lets begin on the story of Jon's weekend. So Jon arrived back to camp on friday with his girlfriend Dayna, the weekend was full of potential. Even though Dayna was only here for two days they still made the most of it by taking in the sun and swimming in our refreshing lake. The weather could not have been better, 30 degrees and sunny! But then it all went downhill. It started friday night where Dayna found a tick trying to get into her arm, which is not to pretty. We do not know where it came from but we suspected Jon's bed. luckily when she got back to her hometown, she contacted a doctor who explained to her that the ticks up by the camp do not carry harmful diseases like some; so that was a relief. But before the news came that she would be fine, Jon found a weird bite on his leg which he thought was also a tick bite, which frightened him a little bit. To add to the tick bites, saturday while Jon was towing people through the slider park, a suspected horsefly just happened to strike Jon right above his eyelash... don't know how but it did. He was slightly injured but would recover... at least he hoped he would recover. But then it started to swell and swell, and swell to the point where he would wake up on sunday and he could not even open his eye at all. It was swelled shut! Of course this was hilarious to all of us besides Jon. But deep down we all felt his pain and hoped he would get better. He then iced it all day and the swelling went down a significant amount. To add to these traumatic events the mosquitos seemed to be attracted to him and by the end of the weekend it seemed like he had around 100 bites. It was soo bad he had to keep a stick of after-bite attached to his waist. So this was the weekend of Jon, or at least the worse parts of it, I'm sure there were happier times, but that is not interesting for a blog. So everyone please.. a little respect for the man in the photo above. For he is slowly recovering slowly from the mass amounts of bug bites, back at his home in Orillia. 

Roxy Renovations Revitalize Basecamp!

A couple of days ago the local delivery man stopped by 1901 Peninsula Road and dropped a large load off at Basecamp.  To the dismay of many of the staff, it was not the seasonal delivery of sponsored gear, but instead numerous boxes of Roxy product to be used in the revamping of the Roxy cabin.  While this is arguably the nicest of the three cabins on the Basecamp property, there is always room for improvement.  Fortunately, the nice folks at Roxy were courteous enough to supply us with the necessary ammunition to reach this greater level of comfort.  On Monday night Scotty picked up Sarah from Roxy, who had just arrived in TO from BC, and they proceeded to hit up Ikea to pick out the rest of the items to spiff up the cabin.  Tuesday morning we all got to work, clearing out two of the rooms and the bathroom.  After a couple of coats of bright, vibrant, "summery"-coloured paint and some surface level renos in the bathroom, work for the day was complete.  This morning the team got to work re-assembling the rooms and once that was complete, un-packaging of all the Roxy/Ikea items began.  After a few hours, everything had found its new home throughout the cabin and the overhaul was officially complete.  Check out the before/after photos and note the changes for yourself - they are quite drastic if I may say.  Keep your eyes open for a video recapping all the work/changes coming soon to the blog/youtube.  There might even be an appearance or two from special guests whose identities cannot yet be released.  Exciting stuff!!!  Thanks again to Sarah and everyone from Roxy for supplying us with accessories to take the Roxy cabin from pretty sweet to exceptionally awesome.  It really looks way better than before, and it couldn't have been done without their assistance! 

Bean Bag loft now open for business!

The games room was getting to be a little cramped, so the only way to expand was straight up. Built in one day, the new bean bag loft is the new ultimate hang out spot. It may have been long tiring work to build it, but lets be serious... it's a bean bag loft. It is two tiered and suspended about 9 feet above the ground. You have a perfect view of the mini ramp, and the projection screen. Rock band on top of the bean bag loft perhaps?? It comfortably fits 6, but we do not have enough people to test its true capacity. Made to fit the contours of your body, and a bean bag just for that little extra comfort, it is truly amazing!