Aiming for a good plink or two followed by a run of pitty-pats, Rick "Hard Luck” Loy snaps his wrist and flicks a leading finger to propel a stone into motion.
Throwing his weight into the launch, Loy strives for the combination of velocity, spin, distance and angle that will send the stone bouncing over the water in a blossom of concentric circles.
A previous world record-holder for the number of skips and a regular winner of the annual Stone Skipping Contest at Mackinac Island since 1973, Loy has honed his specialized skill to a fine point. The event is hosted by the Mackinac Island Stone Skipping and Gerplunking Club, which also welcomes amateur skippers of all ages.
Loy's right-handed sidearm motion involves his whole body as he focuses all his power and intensity into the fling.
"The trick is that everybody thinks a nice smooth round stone skips better but you want one with a little bit of rougher edges, something to pop it out of the water,” said Loy, who has discerned many "tricks.” "The trick is throwing the rock at the right angle, throw it with spin to get more of a reaction to the water. The trick is you don't throw at the water, you throw parallel to it.”
To Loy, who works as a computer technician in Traverse City, it's all about physics underpinned by his personal philosophy about the sport. Gathering his own shale rocks, which are abundant in Michigan, stone skipping is a natural reaction by people on the beach surrounded by stones and water.
"Stone skipping is an everyman sport,” said Loy, who gathers buckets of rocks for sporadic practice. "That's why they have banished manufactured rocks because if you allowed those, only the rich would have them.”
Loy has also taken second prize "numerous” times, including in 2006. The professional category typically draws eight to ten contestants every year and Loy is always there; in fact, he has not missed a Stone Skipping Contest since his first 1973. The event, now in it's 44th year, will be held today at Mackinac Island and Loy is hoping to reclaim his title.
"I was in the Guinness Book of World Records from the 70s through the late 80s,” he said of his prowess, which has earned him nominal cash prizes; amateur winners earn a year's supply of Mackinac Island fudge.
The basic plan is that each professional competitors receives six stones, collectively known as a chukker. Participants each choose a numbered rock (what else?) from a bucket to determine the skipping order for all of the six rounds. The person who throws the stone that achieves the highest number of skips, as counted by a judge, is the winner. For the professionals, these totals can range up into the twenties and thirties, with the world record currently standing at 40 skips.
"If there's a tie for first place, then they look at second, then third and so on,” said Loy of the sometimes nail-biting accounting at the end of the competition. "I've lost on the fourth highest skip.”
Loy traces his stone skipping to a family cottage on Torch Lake, where the far side of the lake has lots of stones. Growing up, he always tried to out skip his dad and a healthy competition arose between him and his younger brother, David, too.
The traditional annual family excursion to Mackinac Island launched him into the world of stone skipping competitions. In 1973, fed up with his sons' rabble rousing - including climbing Sugar Loaf Rock and terrorizing tourists -- Loy's father encouraged his sons to try the competition, then in its ninth year.
"I entered the contest and won,” recalled Loy, then 18. "So we started going back every year and it turned out there were a few crazies who had learned how to skip stones and Bill Rabe [the event's founder] said, 'You can't have the same people winning all the time' so he made a professional category somewhere around 1978.”
As for his nickname of Hard Luck, Loy earned it, well, the hard way.
"I threw a stone and it was skipping at 24 when somebody from the practice gallery threw one out of the area and it hit mine and it sunk,” he said. "Another time, one of my stones split after seven or eight skips [each piece skipped more.] I contended that each piece of the two should count but they only counted one.”