Oh man! The Island County Fair on Beautiful Whidbey Island. Smells of funnel cakes, corn, corn dogs, delicious barbecues and lots of filthy barn animals, with plenty of hay to go around. Four Beautiful days of fun, laughter and lots of kids yelling with glee; how could you not have a good time? With so much going on at the fair from cooky contests to entertaining musicians it was hard to witness the entire event, but we managed. 2008 marked the inaugural year that Jack’d was apart of the fair. It was difficult to catch peoples attention with so much going on, we had to deploy a few gimmicks to capture their attention. Having our short but sweet skimboard video on constant display enabled more people to interact with us and understand how fun skimboarding is. It was rewarding to see peoples reaction who had never seen or heard about skimboarding before. It kind of permitted a 30 second seminar every-time a person would ask “what is skimboarding?”. Although it’s hard to capture some-ones attention; as most people were content to just looking, the money man a few booths from us had it made. He had a large glass container that was blowing dollar bills around all day, and the idea was that everyone would come guess how much money was in the container. Which continued to draw people to him, a very crafty scheme, as the JBC also tried to guess the amount and win all those floating bills. Auston, AKA Roscoe ended up winning second prize in the guessing game. Not that this is relevant to Jack’ds participation in the fair, but it was a good learning experience nonetheless. Hopefully we’ll see you next year when the fair revives the oiled pig contest.
Choochokam Summer 2008: the show.
This year the festival hosted 50 performers and over 100 fine artists and craftspeople on the beautiful seaside of Langley, just northwest of Seattle on Whidbey Island. Jack’d Skimboards has been attending Choochokam for 5 years. This unique festival brings us back to our roots, and reminds us where the Jack’d Legend all started. Unfortunatly some people skipped out on the festival due to a fear of obtaining the dreaded whooping cough. This propaganda brought on by the media did not intimidate any locals, so the turn out was still great. We had a prime booth location this year, right in front of the stage. We enjoyed a wide variety of music including Marimba, Reggae, Rock, Folk, Funk, African drumming, and many others. Skimboard sales were great, we also designed a special tee shirt dedicated to Whidbey Island which sold out the first day. The best part was watching stoked kids walking away from our booth with freshly made Jack’d Skimboards, then seeing them at the beach hours later riding like champions. We had a convenient two man rotation at the booth, so each team got some skim time. Choochokam is always a great success, we look forward to attending next summer.
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