When Wes Miller was filming for one of his Huevos videos, he came to me with the idea of riding my Banshee on Lake Mead to see how fast and far I could go. I had been working with Wes on a few projects before and I committed to this one. I told him I'd be in touch in about a month so I could have some time to get a quad set up for the job. It wasn't until after I hung up the phone that I started thinking to myself, How do you set up a quad to do this? How exactly do I get a quad to run across a lake?
I was completely shooting from the hip on this one and had no idea how to set up this machine. I knew it was going to be a challenge, but one that I was up to. On one of my first attempts I purchased a couple of snowboards from a local ski shop, cut them in half and mounted them up front on my Banshee, figuring they would help me in skimming across the lake like they were water skis. With my makeshift skis mounted, we went to the lake for my first run. As I went flying down the road with the throttle wide open, I got a rude awakening as soon as I hit the water. Upon hitting the water at top speed, the "skis" I had attached to my quad did nothing but cause me to endo hard into the water with violent force. That hurt really bad! I was sore for days.
As time went on, I got better and the modifications to the machine improved. AC Racing put together a bumper for me that made the front end of my Banshee look like a bass fishing boat, and Larry at Skat-Trak made me a set of custom 25-inch Ripper paddle tires. Larry told me that these were such an aggressive paddle that I needed some serious horsepower to run them. For this reason, I took the displacement from 350 all the way to 440cc. Looking at the machine as it was ready to be taken out of the shop, you could tell that this thing was going to boogie down.
I scheduled the big day with Wes and his crew to shoot our official attempt at the Watercross and met up with him at the lake. As we rolled up, some of the local law enforcement came over and gave us a stern warning not to do what they thought we were going to do. They had seen my previous test runs and were out to get me. After being told not to even bother unloading the quad, I waited for them to get a safe distance away and prepared to do what I came to. I unloaded my quad and proceeded to put on all of my safety gear.
Now I normally ride in regular MX-style gear which is usually comprised of pants, jersey, gloves, boots and helmet. From my previous failed attempts, my body took some hard hits, so I stepped up my protection to a full racing suit, neck brace and, of course, a life jacket. Ready to go, I fired up my quad and made my first practice run to the shore. Before I made my U-turn to take the final run, I had one thing going through my head. I knew that I was going to be boogying down this road as I estimated that I would have to be going at least 88-92 mph on my approach and around 100 to get on top of the water. If anything was going to go wrong, it was going to hurt.
I began my run roughly a quarter of a mile back from the shoreline in order to give me plenty of running room to reach my top speed. I left my starting line and focused on safely hitting the water as it rapidly approached, banging through fourth gear, then fifth and as I hit sixth all I could think of was, What am I doing? On one of my first attempts ever trying this, I crashed hard only doing around 55 mph and here I was approaching speeds of 100. I cleared my head and told myself this has to work as I pulled back on the bar and held the gas as I started skimming on the water.