One Simple Question Guaranteed To Piss Off Any Powerboating Event Organizer
Set for June 27-29 this year, the Lake Cumberland Thunder Run in Kentucky opened registration yesterday. For the past few years, the event has been happened a couple of weekends earlier, and the typical spring rains in the area have flushed most everything on the forest floor—logs, branches, dead opossums and other unpleasant things that will do your propellers, drives and hull no favors—into the water.
As a result, the 17-year-old event has seen participation steadily decline.
So why didn’t Thunder Run organizers Justin Lucas and Dan Weiss “just change the dates” per the unsolicited advice of so many, to put it kindly, numbskulls for the past few years?
Here’s a fun idea: Ask Lucas and Weiss that question. Then step back and watch their heads explode.
Let’s start with what should be obvious. Most lakes are public spaces, meaning—pesky as it is—they have to be shared. Producing events on those spaces require permits, for without them there is no insurance and without insurance there are no events. Permits, hence the plural usage, means more than one, which in turns means working with more than one permit-granting agency.
Forget that nothing about the event-permitting process is fun. Remember than it doesn’t happen overnight.
And of course, the new dates you want actually have to be available. If another event is already permitted for the same dates, you’re immediately out of luck.
That Lucas and Weiss were able to pull off a date change on a waterway as busy during the season as Lake Cumberland is a small miracle that took years. So when you see them this year at the Thunder Run, the best thing you can do is tip your hat and thank them.
The last thing you want to do? Ask what took so long.—Matt Trulio
