First stone-skipping event successful, founder says

John Baker, founder of the Great Southern Stone-Skipping Championships, practices skipping rocks. Baker said the event, which was held at the Fairfield Bay Marina earlier this month, raised $3,300 for food pantries in Choctaw, Clinton and Greers Ferry.
John Baker, founder of the Great Southern Stone-Skipping Championships, practices skipping rocks. Baker said the event, which was held at the Fairfield Bay Marina earlier this month, raised $3,300 for food pantries in Choctaw, Clinton and Greers Ferry.

The Great Southern Stone-Skipping Championships — the first in Arkansas — held at the Fairfield Bay Marina earlier this month was so much fun that the event will likely be held again next year, said founder John Baker of Little Rock.

He said the competition also successfully raised $3,300 for food pantries in Choctaw, Clinton and Greers Ferry.

“It was great; we had like 85 people there,” he said. “We had 32 paying competitors, eight children and 24 adults.”

Baker said he was surprised that world-record-holder Kurt “Mountain Man” Steiner of Pennsylvania showed up at the Sept. 3 event to compete, as well as Drew Quayle of Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.

“They were surprised there weren’t any rock-skipping contests down here,” Baker said. He said stone-skipping competitions are common in the North, but he’d never heard of one in Arkansas.

Steiner won with 33 skips. That was far shy of his world-record 88 skips, but it still blew the competition out of the water, and Quayle placed second with 20 skips. Todd Dahlin of Mountain Home placed third with 19 skips after a tie-breaker between him and Quayle.

Participants each got three attempts, which were tallied. The top five from each flight were in a skip-off, and they each got five chances.

Baker said he grew up skipping rocks anytime he was near the water, and he’s taught his four children to skip rocks. When he and his brother, Troy Baker of Little Rock, were skipping stones one day, they started wondering who had the world record. That’s when they learned about Steiner.

The Baker brothers were also surprised that there wasn’t a stone-skipping event in Arkansas, at least that they could find. Troy Baker, an attorney, formed a nonprofit organization, Great Southern

Stone-Skipping Championships Inc., and recruited two friends to join him on a board of directors.

John Baker said he has a weekend home in Fairfield Bay, so he knew the fishing cove at the Fairfield Bay Marina was a perfect rock-skipping site. He also had to get a permit from the U.S. Army Corps of

Engineers to hold the event. He decided to give the proceeds to the Arkansas Food Bank, which in turn allocated the money to area food banks.

“I thought this would be sort of a family-fun, humorous, spectator-competitor fundraiser, and that’s kind of how it was born,” he said in an earlier story in the Three Rivers Edition.

The winners of the children’s flight were first place, Rustin Holt of Shirley with 13 skips; second place, Drew Baker of Little Rock with nine skips; and third place, Olivia Treece of Greenbrier with five skips.

Adam Treece, 35, of Greenbrier, said he and his family noticed a flier in a Starbucks advertising the event and thought it sounded like fun, and he took his 8-year-old daughter, Olivia, to the competition.

“We were going to watch, and I was always planning to enter, but she wasn’t until we got there,” he said. “She had never skipped a rock before. I was going to teach her to skip before we got started.”

He said Olivia was just picking up rocks along the shoreline, and she made a couple of skips.

“Some of the people had brought some rocks that were better for skipping; she used one of those,” he said.

Olivia said the secret to her success was “flick the rock close to the water, and it’ll start skipping.”

The third-grader at Eastside Elementary School in Greenbrier won $50 for her five skips. “I want to save it,” she said.

She told a couple of her friends at school that she’d won $50 skipping rocks, and they thought “it was cool,” she said.

“She was ecstatic,” Treece said. “All she’s talked about since then is we’re going to practice up for next year because she wants to win.”

Olivia said there is a pond “in our backyard,” which her father said was through the woods and belonged to a neighbor, but that will be a perfect place to practice.

She said she wants to “get a better score next year,” and her goal is to skip a rock 10 times.

“We went just for fun,” Treece said. “I had no idea … some people take it quite seriously. People traveled for it; I thought that was pretty neat.”

Claude Ruiz, who started Choctaw Food Bank Inc. with his wife, Karen, said he missed the event because he was out of town, but he was happy to hear how much money was raised.

“Wow. I can always use every dollar I can get. When you feed 400 families a week, that’s a lot of food,” Ruiz said.

“It’s so easy because you don’t have a lot of setup,” Baker said of the stone-skipping competition. “It was funny, and people liked it — and it was easy to raise money for, so I think we’ll do it again.”

Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.

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