EDMONDS – The sound of flesh hitting water came in degrees of sharpness and decibel levels, from soft swishes to acute slaps to deep “kerplunks.”
The volume of water displaced varied, from gentle sprays to chaotic spritzes to far-reaching fountains.
But nobody made a bigger splash July 16 than Dan Langley.
The Edmonds native, now a resident of Tulsa, Okla., returned home to steal the show at Yost Pool’s annual belly-flop and cannonball contest.
Langley, 30, first did a flip and back-flopped into the water, his muscular, former lifeguard’s body making a resounding slap – drawing a score of two 10s and an 8 from the three judges. The second time, he did a straight, perfectly executed belly flop, drawing a 10, a 9.5 and an 8.5.
But his third jump is the one that got the crowd hooting and hollering. He sprang high off the board, did a mid-air gyration and slapped the water on his right side, displacing a huge amount of the pool.
The result: three 10s from the judges, one of whom had been notably miserly in his scoring of the adult contestants.
“It’s always nice to see the reaction from the crowd,” said Langley, who said he won the contest four years in a row while working as a lifeguard at Yost Pool in the early 1990s. Now an ocular surgeon, he was in town to visit his mom.
The flops didn’t hurt, he said. “I can’t feel it at all, too much adrenaline.”
Twenty-seven kids and six adult men competed in the contest. While it was technically a belly flop-cannonball contest, judges were told to score for creativity as well.
“You can do a ninja kick, you can do a ninja nose-pick kick, you can do a ninja punch, too,” lifeguard Dell Morey told the kids as they lined up to jump.
All manners of entry into the water were seen, from head-first plunges to spread eagles, and the judges were generous in the scoring with the younger set, several of whom were 5 to 7 years old.
“I gave higher scores to the belly flops,” said judge Jessica Morey. She looked for flops that made a loud noise and in which the jumper didn’t plunge too far into the water.
Eric Whitney, 11, won the children’s category with a big-splash cannonball and two classic flops, which he said didn’t hurt. Eric lives just up the hill from the pool, is a frequent user and had practiced moves.
Mitchell Molina, 7, of Edmonds, got high scores from the judges with his flip-flops into the water. “I’ve been practicing my moves on the diving board so I could get better,” he said.
One contestant, who admitted the pain of the flop, was sunburned Tony Marti, 22. He did one jump that emcee Paul Uhl dubbed the “sloppy floppy.”
“I was going big,” Marti said.
For winning, Langley and Whitney each won a free private party at the pool. Second prize for the kids was a free haircut, for the adults a life jacket. Third prize for both was 10 free visits to the pool.
Bill Sheets is a reporter for The Herald in Everett.
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