From Minnesota Monthly:
Late one afternoon last summer, our family arrived at a campsite on the western shore of Lake Michigan. We had been driving all day, across Wisconsin on our way further east. The four of us—my wife and two daughters, ages 7 and 10—set up our tent, made dinner, then went down to the water. Two-foot waves were rolling across the lake, a taste of what lay ahead: We were going to the Mackinac Island Stone Skipping Competition—the oldest, most prestigious rock-skipping tournament in the United States, if not the world. Every Fourth of July, elite skippers (many former and current world-record holders) take turns throwing their stones into the waters where lakes Huron and Michigan meet, also known for having rolling, two-foot waves crashing on the beach.
I looked down, saw a decent skipping stone, and picked it up. My daughters were watching. The older one spoke up.
“Are you prepared for the fact that you probably won’t win?” she asked.
I threw the stone.
“Four,” she said. “But it caught a wave.”
My shoulders sagged.
“Don’t doubt yourself, Daddy!”
Her younger sister looked at her. “But you doubted him,” she said.
“That’s different.”
Prepared or not, I knew I had a knack for skipping. Some years earlier, I’d been driving through the mountains when I stopped at a roadside lake. The water was smooth as glass. I bent down, picked up a wide, flat stone, and sent it skimming across the water. It went on for what felt like forever, until it finally hit the rocky shore on the other side.
Behind me, a young boy spoke up.
“Wow,” he said. “You must be the world-champion rock skipper.”
I wasn’t. At least not yet. But I’d been skipping stones my whole life, ever since I was around my daughters’ ages, always getting better and better. There was almost nothing I loved better than the feeling of knowing—even before it hit the water—that you had a perfect throw, one that defies nature by making a stone both fly and float.
Mackinac, I had learned, was the place where such things were decided. These were my people—the ones who could spend hours on a beach looking for just the right stone, who would fill bags and boxes with skippers from secret locations, who would throw until their arm gave way, lost in the simple sorcery of stone skipping.
“It has been explosive,” says NICA’s executive director, Austin McInerny. “We grew 43 percent from 2015 to 2016. Some of the leagues are seeing more in the 7th- and 8th-grade fields than in the older ones. I’m calling that the tip of the iceberg. I think it could grow even quicker if we found more adults who wanted to step up and run those teams.”
