Adams Lake Memories

Ever since I can remember, basically from when I was born until the year 2006 or so, I would go up to my family's lake cottage to spend a few days at a time relaxing and hanging out with family and friends and simply enjoy life. In the summer months when I was very young and growing up, when my father had vacation time off from work or during weekends, we would pack up the truck head to the lake. This quickly became a family tradition and way of life for us every summer. My most fond memories of being young are of all of us, my father, mother, and brother, visiting our family lake cottage. We would spend the days going out on the lake in my father's Rinker speedboat, going tubing or swimming on the lake, coming back in for lunch, playing with the neighbor's kids who we all quickly became friends with, then my father grilling dinner and eating on the screened-in porch, overlooking the west side of the lake. Occasionally, late in the evenings we would go back out onto the lake for late night swimming. At that time of night, you can practically have the lake all to yourself and go swimming in the middle of the lake under the stars because almost all, if not all of the other boaters, would be off the lake. During the summer of 1996, with the help and patience of my father, and my brother's and my own perseverance, we both learned to water ski when I was about 10 and my brother was about 12. In the following years, this became one of my favorite pastimes to do on the lake. I always skied with both skis because I enjoyed it more and was better at it than slalom water skiing, something I never did really master. I had successfully gotten up a few times on only one ski, but I was unstable and uncomfortable slalom skiing, so I stuck to two skis almost all the time. I really enjoyed skiing with my friends doubling, tripling, or even quadrupling skiers behind a speedboat. We would often double up while we went tubing as well. In the later years of my youth at the lake, my brother would prove to be the real master of the water sports, mainly of wakeboarding. As I grew older and came into my late teenage years and early twenties, I began to lose interest in going up to the lake as I worked at my jobs, hung out with friends in my hometown of Fort Wayne, and maintained my own house in the city. My brother came to enjoy the lake cottage greatly, and eventually bought his own Bombardier Sea-Doo personal watercraft to use on the lake. He and his friends would take turns pulling each other behind the Sea-Doo, skiing, tubing, or wakeboarding, or simply just having fun on the lake with the Sea-Doo, itself. However, most of my brother's enjoyment of wakeboarding came from going out on the lake with his friends who also had a lake cottage of their own a couple of properties down from ours. Using their MasterCraft X-series wakeboarding boat, my brother and the rest of his "Adams Lake Posse" would wakeboard most of the days they spent up there, sometimes going out all day or even at neighboring lakes such as Sylvan or Oliver. Last year in 2012, my father decided to sell the his lake cottage for many different reasons. Having bought the cottage just a mere shack mainly used for fishing and short stays by the previous owners in 1976, I'm sure it leaves a void for him in particular, not to mention my mother and brother, but I know the void will be filled by other activities my father has planned after he retires next year.