We take certain things as given. Roads, for example, are made for driving in. Even riding motorcycles or bicycles.
But changing weather has a way of throwing curveballs at us, and when it does, some people find other uses for roadways. Like this guy, riding a jet ski on the street.
Uploaded to Instagram (and presented here for your amusement) is video of a guy riding through the street on a Kawasaki 550 – the kind of standup personal watercraft popularized in the 1980s. He hasn’t put it on wheels or otherwise modified it for use on dry land – the weather in California took care of that for him.
Apparently this past Sunday saw massive rainfalls in Orange County, California, where this video was captured on Yale Avenue in Fullerton. So an eight-inch gutter on the side of the road turned into a river deep enough for the watercraft (which draws minimal draft) to zoom along, apparently without bottoming out and scraping the hull, small as it is.
Mind you, this isn’t some ordinary fella who just happens to have a personal watercraft in the garage. The gentleman depicted in the video is one two-time World Motosurf champion Mark Gomez, who apparently loves what he does for a living.
In case you were wondering (as we were), while the sit-down style has emerged more popular, Kawasaki still makes stand-up jet skis like the kind depicted in this video. The current SX-R measures all nearly nine feet) long, weighs just over 550 pounds, and packs a 1.5-liter inline-four to give it 957 pounds of thrust. That’s a heck of a power-to-weight ratio, retailing for $10k.
Video
A video posted by Mark Gomez (@markgomez137) on Jan 22, 2017 at 7:41pm PST