In Stone-Skipping Circles, A Rocky Debate Over Equipment

Joe Crain, the 2012 West Coast stone-skipping champion, offers a few inside tips for how get the most skips out of your stone. WSJ’s Zusha Elinson reports.

Among competitive stone-skippers, nothing makes ripples like a disagreement about regulation rocks.
The latest dispute in this sport for people who skim small stones across water is over imports used in competition.
At the Mackinac Island Stone Skipping & Gerplunking Club championships, some believe participants are supposed to source their equipment from the pebble-lined beaches of this Lake Huron island.
But there is growing concern that some competitors in America’s oldest stone-skipping competition this July 4 are bringing rocks from other places that offer an unfair advantage.
Enforcing a ban on imports “would really level the playing the field,” says John “Skippy” Kolar, the 55-year-old chairman of the club, who calls himself a stone “purist.”
Lake Erie skipping stone

Importing stones “renders a disadvantage to the local people,” he says. There is also an environmental concern: “You may be bringing in an unwanted traveler that exists on that stone that would do something drastic in the Great Lakes.”
Stone disputes have threatened to sink stone-skipping competitions before. In the late 1970s, contestants began showing up with doctored rocks. Some brought man-made specimens, pressed out of sand into an ideal shape and weight. One contestant tried (and failed) to affix a firecracker, effectively creating a rocket-propelled rock. Another proposed patenting a synthetic rubber model.
After some controversial throws, the tournament’s late founding father Wilmer T. “Bill” Rabe banned all performance-enhancing stones. He decreed that only natural stones could be used and that any off-island stone would be subject to examination by official tournament judges and sterilization in a pot of boiling water.
The Mackinac tournament, invented as a tourist draw in 1969, attracts hundreds of people each summer to both amateur and professional heats. There are official judges who count the number of skips and declare the winner, and there is a skip-by-skip announcer, Eric “The Voice” Steiner, who is responsible for many of the nicknames.

Russ Byars
Lake Erie stones used by Russell ‘Rock Bottom’ Byars, current record holder.

The tournament made such a splash that events have sprung up across the country in places such as Pennsylvania and California.
Many adopt the Mackinac rules and terms of art: a “plink” is a clean skip, a “plonk” is a stone that sinks on the first hit and “pitty-pats” are the short skips at the end of the run. (Gerplunking is a children’s form of stone-skipping in which the stone is dropped in the water resulting in a “gerplunk.”)
Among the pros, stone selection is often shrouded in secrecy.
On a recent sunny afternoon, Joseph “Joe” Crain—who won last year’s South Yuba River Citizens League Stone Skipping Championship in Bridgeport, Calif., with a 28-skip toss—searched the banks of the Yuba for the perfect stone. He sought flat, evenly weighted rocks with “flat squarish edges” and some sort of unevenness to wrap his finger around. A perfectly round rock isn’t ideal, he says.
At the edge of the water, Mr. Crain, 36, practiced his sidearm delivery, sending stones skittering across the calm river with a ferocious spin and generating a few “oohs” from families who happened to be on the shore. He says he likes to pretend that he is sliding the rock across a table before giving it a “nice snap” at the release point to set the stone spinning.
Mr. Crain says that his best toss at last year’s championship was with a heart-shaped stone he found in Ireland. But when asked where he hunts for his pieces of perfect shale in the collection that he has amassed over the years, he stonewalls. “I’m not going to give that secret away,” he says.
At Mackinac Island, the stone-provenance question could be raised for a vote at a future meeting of the Winter Rules Committee, which either governs the tournament and sets policy, or gets together for a night of drinking, depending upon whom you ask.
“We officially have an unofficial position that has been tabled for discussion,” says chairman Mr. Kolar, who came to fame with a 24-skip throw that tied the world record at the time in 1977.
The most well-known rock importer is Russell “Rock Bottom” Byars, whose 51-skip toss in 2007 is still etched in the Guinness Book of World Records. According to his rivals, Mr. Byars brings in particularly effective rocks, known as “Pennsylvania oil stones” because they are so slick.
Mr. Byars, 50, says that reports of oily stones are just stone-skippers’ tales. He says he collects the rocks from Lake Erie, about 70 miles from his home in Franklin, Pa. The pieces of Devonian shale are particularly suited for the task because they are flat and semirounded, but they aren’t “oily,” he says.
“If they ban bringing stones over, they better not check my pockets,” Mr. Byars says.

Sarah Marx
Kurt ‘Mountain Man’ Steiner, Mr. Byars and John ‘Skippy’ Kolar.

Alistair “Barrel Maker” Cooper, 32, known for his cannon arm and his kilt, says he isn’t naive to the fact that “everybody is trying to get an edge,” but he disagrees with any effort to ban imported stones at the Mackinac Island tournament.
“The problem with that is they’re trying to elevate the sport, if you can call it that, and in order to interest the people on the shore you need to encourage a high number of skips and you’re not going to do that with the stones that are there,” Mr. Cooper says.
Mackinac resident Todd “Mussels” Callewaert, who gets in shape by tossing six to eight stones every evening for a month, says he practices with local rocks that are ill-formed to improve his throws. At the competition, he pulls from a box of off-island Lake Erie stones.
“They have nice edges and they’re rounder so they don’t catch,” says Mr. Callewaert.
To be sure, many native Michigan skippers have benefited greatly from Mr. Byars’ controversial Lake Erie cache. He mails boxes of them to several of his competitors, and lugs a 100-pound utility bag full of them to the Mackinac competition to share with everyone.
This year, he has stockpiled 500 pounds of Lake Erie shale in his garage that he will be sharing at the Pennsylvania and Michigan tournaments.
Mr. Kolar says that the unsettled stone debate has echoes in other sports. “It’s part of the game,” he says. “The golf ball went through its evolution—the same thing will happen here.”
Write to Zusha Elinson at zusha.elinson@wsj.com
A version of this article appeared July 2, 2013, on page A1 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: In Competitive Stone-Skipping Circles, A Rocky Debate Over Equipment.

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