When I write these recaps I always start by scrolling through the thousands of pictures from the season. What is so amazing to me every year is that through sunshine and rain storms, chilly mornings and sweltering afternoons, beginners trying to get up for the first time and veterans messing around riding triples, new campers who show up alone and returners who seem to know everyone there is one constant…the ubiquitous signs of smiles, laughter and fun.
Water Monkey is a tiny camp but I truly believe that for the campers who find their way to us every summer there is no better place for them to be. I take tremendous pride in the experience we offer, the time we dedicate to each of our campers getting to learn and improve and to never cutting corners in our staffing, equipment, meals and safety. I hope that commitment to our campers - your kids - comes through when you hear their camp stories and scroll through the pictures each night when we upload them.
And now…stats from our 14th season of camp:
7 weeks of camp from mid-June to mid-August.
88.89% full (112 spaces filled out of 126 with 104 unique campers)
Campers stayed an average of 1.15 weeks at camp
Average number of campers each week was 16.57
Campers were 69.29% boys and 30.71% girls
Average camper age was 13.73
30.36% new campers and 69.64% returners
Campers came from 10 states (CO, CT, MA, ME, MN, NH, NJ, NY, PA and VT) as well as France.
6 coaches, 1 chef and 1 director
Average coach age was 20.33
Campers come in all shapes and sizes so we used over 67 wakeboards / wakesurf boards / skis
7 sizes of Liquid Force wakeboards (10 board setups in all)
14 models / sizes of Phase 5 wakesurf boards (47 boards in all)
5 pairs of combo skis, 3 sizes of Radar slalom skis, 2 wakeskates
$undisclosed wagered in cabin poker
0 days missed due to weather (14 weekends of rain before camp started!)
Average lake water temp during camp was about 81 degrees
2760 homemade meals and 750 desserts served up lakeside
35 5-gallon buckets of food scraps added to our brand-new compost pile, diverting about 500 lbs of waste from the landfill
250 hours of private lessons on our boats and client boats
8,905 pictures and videos uploaded and shared with our camp families
11,000 visitors to www.watermonkeycamp.com in the past year (9,400 unique) spent an average of 79 seconds on the site and engaged 20,313 page views
575 hours logged on our two Supra boats
27.5 hours spent washing down the boats
Our boats had 11 oil changes, 5 raw water impellers and 5 fuel filters
3,932.925 gallons of premium marine fuel burned by our boats producing roughly 34.94 metric tons of CO2 (77,030 pounds). We offset this pollution through a donation to CoolEffect.org of $635.12 which has been our charity of choice for over 12 years. We also made a $75 contribution to SELT to help in their effort to conserve the entire watershed around our amazing lake.
We have now offset roughly 500 metric tons (over 1.1 million pounds) of CO2 since 2012!
2026 will be our 15th season of camp! You can expect two brand-new 2026 Supra SV’s, all the boards and gear you can handle and, quite possibly, our best staff ever (we’ve already hired most of the staff)! As always, camp doesn’t happen without you so I sincerely hope to welcome each of our campers back for more good times at the lake.
-Evan
603-321-8327