PORT ANGELES — Ron Rogers crossed the Strait of Juan de Fuca on a waterski Sunday but was forced to cancel his planned ski trip back across due to dangerous conditions in the water.
Rogers began his 17-mile trip at 10:20 a.m. at Port Angeles Boat Haven and reached Ogden Point in Victoria Harbour at about 11:30 a.m., finishing in nearly twice the time he had estimated it would take.
“It’s not easy. It’s nothing like skiing on a lake,” he said.
He has said that while he knows he is not the first person to cross the Strait on waterskis, he believes that at age 61 he is the oldest.
The first person to ski across the Strait was former KONP radio announcer Dick Goodman in 1957, when he was in his 20s.
Rogers, a Port Angeles resident and experienced lake waterskier, was wearing a dry suit and was towed by Josh Armstrong in his 35-foot aluminum boat, which was built at his Armstrong Marine.
The boat and its twin 250-horsepower engines needed to maintain a speed of 35 to 45 mph to keep Rogers upright on a 7-foot-long wooden slalom ski. The water was between 40 and 50 degrees Fahrenheit.
The dry suit did the job for warmth, Rogers said, so the cold water and wind never became a factor.
Rogers said that while he had water-skied in the Caribbean once and made a test run Saturday in Port Angeles Harbor with the Armstrong boat, he had little experience with waterskis in salt water.
Wakes of passing freighters and tankers can create a 5-foot wave, which can dump a person on waterskis into the water, he said.
There is also the danger of wind waves, large swells and submerged logs and other objects in the water that the boat or waterskier can hit.
On Sunday the water was nearly glass smooth as Rogers left Port Angeles Harbor, but conditions quickly changed.
“A couple miles out, a freighter put up a wake. I thought I was going to go down but I didn’t,” he said.
Rogers said after the tanker wake there were “rollers” and “wind rifts” that forced him to pay close attention to where he was going.
“About 1.8 miles out from Ogden Point, I went down,” he said.
Something under the water made his waterski simply stop, he said, and sent him flying.
“I was launched. It knocked the stuffing out of me. I was knocked senseless for a while,” he said.
Once it was established that Rogers was able to continue, he switched his slalom ski for a pair of skis, then continued the trip northward.
Rogers said conditions just got worse after that.
There was a large debris field made up of large logs and other flotsam on the north side of the Strait, and the wind picked up, creating rough water.
“We were weaving in and out of the debris” Rogers said.
When Rogers and his boat team reached Canadian shore, they made the decision that it was too dangerous to make the return trip.
He returned to Port Angeles as a passenger in Armstrong’s boat.
Rogers said will not be making a second attempt to make the round trip due to an upcoming knee surgery.
In his life experience, the trip across the Strait was among his top 10 memorable moments, right up there with getting married and the birth of his daughter, Shauna Rogers, he said.
Rogers has said he has dreamed of this attempt for 44 years.
Earlier this week, he recalled when, as press foreman for the Peninsula Daily News, he would stand on the newspaper’s loading dock and gaze across the Strait on calm nights, dreaming of the day he would ski it.
Rogers retired from the PDN in 1999 after 29 years at the paper.
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Reporter Arwyn Rice can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5070, or at arice@peninsuladailynews.com.
Reporter James Casey contributed to this report.
