Posted on 02/08/2006 4:49:00 AM PST by Mikey_1962
Hold muh microphone and watch this!
This doesn't sound like a Darwin candidate to me. Sounds like a tragic accident. My sympathies to the family.
My condolences to the family. But if the wind was strong enough to pick up a tractor, it might not have been a good ideas to go 'land sailing'.
Or, otherwise known as... Proof there's a very fine line between "living life on the edge" and "nature's way of weeding out the stupid".
When one of the other families arrived, they found the two guys trying to get one's jeep dug out of the sandy shoreline where it's front end had sunk into a deep hole along the water's edge. Asking how it had happened, they were told the two were water skiing when the boat broke down. Not to be discouraged, they decided they could tie the rope to the back of the jeep and one would ski along the water's edge while the other drove the jeep.
End of story!
Nope. A tragedy is a story in which the protagonist meets his demise because of a flaw in his character that proves fatal. Sophocles wrote tragedies.
This guy was just a dumbass.
I used to water ski in the irrigation canal on 2x4 boards behind a car.
A few years back I watched a Navy team of skydivers get blown out to sea by sudden wind gusts. One died. I guess he was a dumbass and Darwin candidate, too.
You're pathetic.
A 37mph wind picked up a TRACTOR!?!? Was it one of those papier mache and balsa wood tractors?
That's what I was thinking. What kind of tractor could get rolled by a strong breeze??? Unless it was a garden tractor, or some other vehicle the idiot reporter mistook as a tractor, never having seen one from his loft window in Manhattan.
"they decided they could tie the rope to the back of the jeep and one would ski along the water's edge while the other drove the jeep."
We did this a lot in high skrool.
Still, picked up the back of a tractor? More likely he slowed down, got slack in the rope, and broke it when he ran over it.
More than likely, the tractor was lifted when the wind impacted the parachute...
I was in Waco this past weekend, and the wind was howling. North Texas is windy anyway, and seems during our recent year-long drought the winds have been worse.
My thoughts exactly.
Sorry, I have no problem with risk sports - I am, myself, a Class V whitewater kayaker who has had some close calls in my long, long, river years. But, this just sounds stupid.. Much closer to "dumbass" than to navy skydivers IMHO.
Your forgetting that there was a giant kite attached to the tractor.
If you wish to twist it, you're welcome to. I'm comparing two people, each doing an event with some risk, finding themselves caught up in unexpected, powerful forces of nature.
Yet people here are falling all over themselves to lump this young man in with goobers using Bic lighters to peer down gas tanks or surfing atop SUVs at highway speed. I really don't see the comparison.
Darwin escapee.
From what I could Goggle, it looks like the maximum diameter on a chute-shaped kite is around 42 feet which can lift 600 pounds with stability in 12 MPH winds, it is feasible that a 37MPH gust could lift and drop a 1500 pound tractor, throwing the driver off and tangling the rider in the harness as the ropes began to break away.
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