Dark Tag

The Watooka Staff Club was the focal point of the community, we had no malls to hang out in, so all the kids hung around the club’s pool. Many pool games were invented or inherited which kept everyone entertained. There were no lifeguards, and some of the games we played would never be allowed in a supervised environment, especially nowadays. For example King of the Castle – where challengers would wrestle the King stationed at the end of the diving board. If the king was thrown into the water without the challenger also going in, the challenger became the new king. This game often resulted in scrapes and bruises from the diving board, and sometimes the edge of the concrete pool, but we always considered it to be enormous fun.

Another game of dubious safety was “Keep the Pot Boiling”, where a line of kids tried to keep water splashes from cannonballs off the diving board continuously in the air. This required the next kid to jump off the diving board before the first kid landed, and everyone tried to land as close as possible to the side of the pool so they could get out of the water and back on the diving board in time to keep the pot boiling. Today, every aspect of this game would be a transgression, running on the side of the pool, too many people on the diving board, jumping while people are still in the water in front, jumping towards the side, jumping close to someone else, yelling too loud, and I’m sure I’m missing some, but these things were what made it so much fun.

Then there was dead man diving, where you pretend to get shot just as you leapt off the diving board.

And there was diving for glasses – drinks came in bottles not cans and were drunk out of glasses because every drink needed ice, no paper cups in sight. Of course glass almost totally disappears in water, so we would throw all the glasses in the deep end and see who could find the most.

Tube diving – seeing how far away you could dive through the hole in n inert tube. The tube might be rolling on the water or even flying through the air at the time.

Knights and horses – traditional water-based piggyback fighting.

Many kinds of races and dares, sometimes involving running around performing tasks on the grounds and down at the river as well as pool antics.

Zillions of kinds of tag, one of which was Dark Tag. We would sometimes gather down at the pool at night, turn off all the pool lights and play tag. The whole pool was so dark, it was impossible to see someone at arms length. The game was all about stealth at close quarters, you had to control your breathing and be able to swim totally silently – quite a bit harder than it sounds. The attraction of the game was more to do with the eeriness of the unknown than actually having a great set of rules. Most of the time you could swear you were the only person in the pool. You have no idea who is actually “it” and if you bump into another quarry, you could actually end up thinking you got tagged. We still played it whenever it was dark enough. One time we arrived to an already darkened pool and were playing for 20 minutes before we discovered there were a couple of older teenagers (who shall remain nameless) “making out” in the deep end. I’ll leave the rest to your imagination, but you will need a pretty good imagination to guess the details of what they were doing.