A plane, an idea, a world record. Barefoot Pilot behind the scenes with Rory Bushfield.
words :: Feet Banks
photography :: Mason Mashon
Rory Bushfield says the important thing, on any given day, is to do your best not to go into town.
“It takes up your whole day. The trick is to stay out of town until you have at least three or four things you need from there. Until then, I like to stay out in the valley, help with the horses, go boating as much as we can or jump off the neighbourhood bridge and then come work on the land. There’s always something to fix out here, and there’s always something to break.”
Bushfield, a professional skier and aviator who has called the Sea to Sky home since 2002, spends most of his summers exploring the Squamish River and Howe Sound or flying his 1954 Cessna 180 around the southern BC coastline and mountains. His daily adventures, usually undertaken with a handful of key friends and at least two or three dogs in tow, are frequently chronicled on his Instagram feed @bushywayne. Bushy, as he’s known, is always up to something—be it jindleboarding (wakeboarding on binding-less boards shaped from scrap wood with a chainsaw), jumping off bridges and cliffs, hauling hay for his girlfriend’s horses, and generally enjoying life as it comes.
But the other thing about not going to town, it frees up more time to dream up new and exciting ways to scare yourself. Like barefoot water skiing out the side of an airplane skimming a lake at around 100 km/hr. And not a float plane, a plane with wheels…
“I learned about skimming plane wheels in Quebec,” Bushy explains. “Flying with a buddy of a buddy who just loves flying and flies all day. And he takes me out and just ducks down to the St. Lawrence river and tips his wheel into the water. It was a mind-boggler for me but he treated it like it was nothing. And so, years later, I got my big bush wheels and tried it out here, and it was like… no way, it’s simple. It works really, really well. And then it wasn’t long after that I started thinking about barefooting out of the plane.”
Barefooting is a form of waterskiing, without skis. Bushfield grew up waterskiing with his dad in Alberta and barefooting, naturally, was his favourite due to the extra speed and skill required.
“I thought about it for probably a decade,” Bushy says. “To get out of the airplane with no help, hold a rope and barefoot past a bunch of friends on the beach. It sounded fun and a lot easier and less complicated than parachuting.”
And so, with longtime partner Monster Energy on board and the support of his closest friends, Bushfield bought the fastest speedboat he could find in order to practice the speeds required to keep the plane in the air while skimming a lake with a human dangling off it.
“It sounded fun and a lot easier and less complicated than parachuting.”
“Normally you barefoot at like 40 mph,” Bushy says. “Our goal was to have the plane going 60 mph but it’s all over the place. Sometimes it’s up around 90 mph. With the friction of the wind hitting your body at 70-80 mph and ten holding your position on the water…I wanted to get used to barefooting at that speed. The boat had no windshield so even just driving it at that speed, I’d have a crooked neck by the end.”
The final challenge, the most important, was finding a pilot comfortable with flying a 69-year-old plane on a lake, while a full-grown human dangles off the right side. Bushy says that he asked “probably six or seven guys but it was difficult to explain and I didn’t really have that much support. People were like, What the hell are you talking about? And then one night it dawned on me: Lambert.”
Lambert Bourgeois, the French pilot who had originally shown him how to skim water in the first place, eventually agreed to come out from Quebec to discuss things. “There is a lot of scrutiny in aviation,” Bushy explains. “So I understand. When you crawl out of the plane it torques around, the pilot really has to compensate and adjust. It’s like he’s making a full left turn but the plane is still drifting right. Plus, he’s trying to go slow enough that I don’t get ripped off the rope and into the tail, but also fast enough to keep the plane in the air, and it’s like snowmobiling, when something feels weird or bogged out your instinct is to give it power, to pin it. Lambert wasn’t even sure he wanted to do it but once he met the team and got out here he was like, ‘OK, I’ll do it.”
And then it was time—a clear, calm Coast Mountain day with all his favourite people on the beach and total trust in a pilot who had, inadvertently, set the whole idea in motion over a decade earlier. According to the folks at Guinness Records, climbing out of an airplane unsupported and barefooting had never been done before. For extra pressure, add in a full camera crew, professional water rescue crew, and an A-Star helicopter with a camera mounted on the nose.
According to the folks at Guinness Records, climbing out of an airplane unsupported and barefooting had never been done before.
Bushy says this project was a dream come true for a number of reasons but most importantly because it allowed him to work with a hand-picked crew of friends and colleagues—he got to choose the people he cared about, and trusted, most in the world.
“My friends were so dialled,” Bushy says. “We’d had a million conversations about it, the worst-case scenarios. My biggest fear was if I step out and we are going too slow, if the engine dies, the plane flips and goes down. I’m fine, on the surface in a barefooting wetsuit, but we had six guys on Seadoos with serrated knives. My buddy Phil was ready to dive down and cut Lambert out of the plane as it sank if we needed to. We even tested which knives cut seatbelts best beforehand.”
And then, after a number of test skims where Bushy stayed in the plane, it was time.
“It felt so awesome to get down to the end of the rope and be skimming. At first when I got out Lambert lifted the plane and I was dangling. I looked over at him like, Dude, I am flying! It was great. Then I got one foot down, spun around, got the other down and got it. I don’t remember how long I held on but I remember letting go, skimming away and the plane buzzing off and the helicopter there and when I stopped moving I could hear everyone on the beach cheering. I’d use the word euphoria but really it was just a nice feeling. Getting back to the beach, there were all my best friends who had taken time out of their lives to help make this happen. Lambert flew off, landed safely, and the rest of us all spent the night there, camping on the beach under the stars. There was so much love there, I couldn’t have felt better.”
Watch Barefoot Pilot at the top of this post or find it here.
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