Kenny and I grew up on the lake and were out on it a lot. We spent a lot of time running up and down Lake Travis in a boat gathering up fish. We weren’t setting out trot lines or dropping hooks in the water either, but that’s a whole other matter we’ll have to get to at another time.

I had a little boat that I had bought and had been waiting for Kenny to get in on leave from the Army before I launched it.

We put the boat in the water one afternoon at Smithwick. The boat was full of gas and we had all the paraphernalia for an afternoon of tearing up the lake skiing. Then it occurred to us both that we didn’t know how to ski. But we figured with a little practice that we could master it.

We found a quite area up the lake from our place to start pulling each other. A 55 HP Chrysler Outboard isn’t the perfect power source to learn to ski behind.

Learning to ski takes a certain amount of patience, especially from the boat driver. Kenny Lewis may be the only person to ever call Smithwick home that had less patience than Cecil Lewis or Ronnie Lewis for that matter. It got dark and we hadn’t had much success with learning to ski. We weren’t ones to give up easily so we continued on.

For anyone that’s ever been in a boat with Kenny Lewis driving, I learned to ski pretty quickly after it got dark. You don’t want Kenny swinging back around to pick you up in daylight hours, much less at night. I guess you could say I learned how to ski out of self preservation. Stay up and then ski to the bank where he could drive over and get me rather than take a chance of being run over in the middle of the lake.

Kenny never let me get ahead of him doing anything, so he followed suit staying up soon thereafter.

Once we knew how to ski, we stayed with it and continued to ski until the wee hours of the morning. Lucky there was a nice moon.