In the most Wally-filled session we’ve seen to date, Sean O’Brien of the Orlando Wakeboard Academy still managed to pull out plenty of hammers. O’Brien has always had a unique style with plenty of one-of-a-kind tricks, and he still made an impressive session, despite having to slalom between pontoon boats full of pale, flabby tourists, the high school crew team, pissed-off bass fishermen, and a host of powerboaters.
This was the first round of The Session that we’ve ever had to shoot for two days because the conditions were so terrible. We were sitting on the dock, praying for rain clouds to appear and clear out the circus on Sean’s lake. When O’Brien says it was just this side of dangerous, he’s not kidding. Our driver was on high alert the entire time, making sure he circled around as quick as possible so Sean didn’t end up on some tubing boat’s prop. You can even see two boats lurking in the background of the photo for this article, just waiting to mess up the water.
O’Brien made the best of the situation, though, and did a tantrum to blind off a roller coming from another group of riders running the “clover leaf” pattern about 20 feet away from us and threw tricks in between rollers. Watch for O’Brien’s grabbed heelside backside 720, indy KGB, and his Wake Awards Best Trick-nominated toeside nose grab frontside osmosis 720.
