Author: Frank Jossi

You love them or you hate them. But would you lose your career over them, the way Kris Hasskamp did? The Rake revisits the tetchy subject of personal watercraft, just as our lightheaded governor pledges to drive one all the way to New Orleans.

Kris Hasskamp began her difficult crusade to regulate jet skiers five years ago with the noble intention of helping elderly retirees find a little silence in the great north woods where they had moved to escape the noise and traffic of the city, only to spend their summers irritated and isolated by the ceaseless noise of miniature powerboats circling their lakes for hours at a time. As a representative of the Brainerd area, she knew well how one of the state’s premiere vacation resort areas had become a cauldron of noise during the summer months.

With their concerns in mind, the House DFLer went to work crafting a modest piece of legislation that would eventually bring about the end of her political career and leave emotional scars that still sear. Although personal watercraft (PWCs) had been around commercially for more than 20 years—remember that first one in the James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me?—their design grew more sophisticated over the past decade as manufacturers moved from the rough-and-tumble standup models requiring a touch of balance and athleticism to sit-down models as easy to drive as a motor scooter. To lake visitors and residents, they had been a mild if tolerable nuisance until the recreation boom of the 1990s. Then the high-flying economy fueled a dramatic increase in PWC sales. Elderly folks reported trouble, in particular, with the noise of jet skis. One resident of Hasskamp’s district had constant summertime angina attacks caused, his doctors thought, by exposure to jet ski noise. Another moved after feeling the stress of noise was effecting his health. One couple tried to escape the PWC roar by cowering in their basement on weekends, when an influx of urban riders added to the cacophony of motorized boats. While seniors could suffer motorboat noise, since it tends to pass quickly on a lake, jet skiers have an annoying habit of going around and around in circles and jumping waves, creating a high volume of noise for hours on end.

“I was getting calls for several years about jet skis after I was elected in 1988,” Hasskamp says. “Part of the reason was the number of jet skis quadrupled in number in the state. Older people were coming to me in tears and angry about all the noise. And then when I heard threats from some residents that they were going to start shooting guns from docks at jet skiers I figured something had to be done.” Never one to shy from a fight and known for her theatrical flair, Hasskamp introduced a law in 1997 and played a tape of a chainsaw to let fellow legislators know just what a jet ski sounds like on a lake. A radio announcer and avid jet skier by the name of Jesse Ventura heard the chainsaw story and, angered by any regulatory efforts involving his favorite recreational vehicle (he owns six), dubbed her “Chainsaw Hasskamp,” a moniker that stuck.

In those Pre-Governor Ventura days, Hasskamp got support from then-Governor Arne Carlson, a majority of the public in polls conducted by the Department of Natural Resources (DNR), and many members of the Legislature. She lost on a couple of key issues, such as banning PWCs on lakes of fewer than 200 acres (jet skiers argued that would have put a majority of the state’s lakes off-limits) and a proposal to allow citizens to file complaints with the DNR against unruly riders. She did, however, manage to see some regulations passed. The new laws forced riders to abide by a150-foot no-wake zone near shore, they restricted PWC use to the hours between 9:30 a.m. and an hour before sunset, they required training of firms renting jet skis, and they imposed age restrictions on riders. The current state jet ski license carries all the state’s regulations printed right on it, so users have no excuse for not knowing them. While those laws may not seem particularly aggressive, they represented progress in a state where summer comes accompanied by the hum of mosquitoes and of jet skis, where one of their major manufacturers, Polaris Industries, resides, and where the governor loves them so much he plans to embark on a trip from the Twin Cities to New Orleans on one.

After being named a “public enemy” by the jet ski industry and the Jetsporters Association of Minnesota (JAM), Hasskamp lost her seat in the 2000 election. But her legislation worked. Jet ski complaints are down and lake owners appear pleased with greater respect riders have for other Minnesotans. The regs also started a small movement to begin to place limits on motorized watercraft in Minnesota through local control. If Hasskamp paid a steep price, the results have impressed even her. “There was going to be road rage on the water and there was great public demand for these laws. Polls both showed more than 90 percent of the public wanted jet ski regulations,” she says. “This is a story about legislation that actually worked.”

Illustration by Matt Adams

At the St. Paul Armory on a sunny Saturday in January, two goateed men wearing NASCAR-style shirts and hats lower their legendary combat robot onto an elevated metal stage surrounded by plexiglass panels. Son of Whyachi is a heavyweight competitor built by Team Whyachi. To fans of combat bot warfare, it represents brute strength and raw power. On this day at a competition called “Mech Wars III,” the appearance of Son of Whyachi causes a stir as judges and emcees cower behind the raised platform where they usually perch. They undoubtedly fear that if the bot rips its opponent to shreds, some of the shrapnel might end up planted in their foreheads.

Son of Whyachi faces Pharmapac, an inelegantly designed but tough black box with a metal snow shovel mounted up front. As the battle begins Son of Whyachi’s mechanical legs spring into action and the rig’s three revolving blades, graced with meat tenderizer-shaped hammers, begin slicing through the air at 130 miles per hour. The blades thrash and crash against Pharmapac, fomenting a cacophony of metal-on-metal noise that could serve as a soundtrack for a war movie. Pharmapac’s body swings widely around during the pummeling, like a fighter trying to regain his footing after too many blows to the head. The crowd is ecstatic, appreciating Son of Whyachi’s relentless barrage against Pharmapac.

Whyachi’s exhibit of brutality does not frighten Craig Lovold, owner of a Holstein-colored bot dubbed Mad Cow. After learning his middleweight bot will face Why Not (the evil kid brother of Son of Whyachi) in its first bout, he does not head for the exit or cower in the corner. The 36-year-old computer programmer arrives at a simple attack strategy for his bot. First he decides to remove the “Spinning Udders of Doom,” a rotating appendage of two hammers and a titanium blade that does its business at 3,000 RPMs. Against Team Whyachi’s huge circling blades, he figures the udders will have little use. Instead, he decides to go for a direct surprise hit and prays that his opponent will die from the shock.

He grows more confident as he watches the Whyachi folks. They madly hover over the three bots they’ve entered into Mech Wars. “We’re optimistic because they’re doing a lot of soldering over there and that’s a good sign,” says Lovold with a grin. Wearing jeans and an “Udder Doom” T-shirt, Lovold has a relaxed style and wit that would not immediately indicate to an outsider that he’s spent many nights in his basement with a few buddies crafting a killer bot. Yet after watching Comedy Central’s hit show “BattleBots” regularly with his 9-year-old son Austin—a common male-bonding ritual in the bot community—he made calls last year to his former colleagues at Wilson Learning, an interactive training and media company. He quickly signed up Sheldon Nelson, Duane Anderson, and Tom Kruchten, all fans of the television program. Lovold began buying parts such as wheels, batteries, and sheet metal to build Mad Cow on a budget that has yet to crest $600. He even managed to attract a few in-kind sponsors who provide welding and materials.

Dubbing themselves “Team Rabid Robotics,” Lovold and friends built a four-wheeled box with direct–drive axles powered by two wheelchair motors. This they covered with armor made out of 11-gauge sheet metal. The crowning achievement was Mad Cow’s “Primary Weapon”—the detachable Udders of Doom hammer-blade combination. Team Rabid Robotics tested the rig, and found it had little trouble annihilating an old computer monitor and a Barcalounger, leaving an impressive mess. Lovold took it out on his driveway in Prior Lake for practice sessions. Some neighbors were frightened, but a posse of youngsters was impressed. Naturally, they’d seen battling bots on television.

Rabid Robotics gave Mad Cow a test run at a Minnesota State Fair exhibition last summer, but Mech Wars III represents its first real competition. And the competition is formidable: Team Whyachi is an intense crew of three who have a reputation for arrogance and a lack of congeniality in the otherwise chummy bot-building community. They wear uniforms, a turnoff for some botsters who don’t like such brazen attempts at professionalism. A woman who helps Whyachi wears a T-shirt that says “Deadly 4-Play,” a message reflecting the team’s general greaseball sensibility.

As it turns out, though, their surliness has more to do with the fact that they were up until 9 the night before, finishing a project at Westar Manufacturing, where they all work. (Whyachi, a term team members invented during innumerable sheepshead card games, is slang for taking someone down hard.) Located in Dorchester, Wisconsin, a small town near Wausau, Westar builds high-speed packaging equipment for the meat processing industry. But its small-town roots have not quelled the ambition of owner and team captain Terry Ewert, a man with big ideas. (Among his more sociable robotic concepts is a “neighborhood electric vehicle,” a sort of quasi-golf cart capable of 25 mph. Ewert hopes to sell it on the team’s web site.)

He dismisses the bad impression some bot builders have of his crew. While Team Whyachi has uniforms, Ewert confesses he simply purchased the clothing out of a catalog and finds it an effective way to spot team members in a crowd. They have sponsorships, unlike most bot builders, but he says it comes mainly in the way of cut-rate supplies and not much cash. And Whyachi’s beauty and craftsmanship come with a steep price tag: Son of Whyachi ran more than $60,000 in materials and labor.

Lovold and Ewert and their gangs represent the range of people who attend competitions and build combat bots. The audience and contestants are overwhelmingly white and male and have jobs in computer programming, engineering, sheet metal operations, and education. Some aspire to take their bots west for combat at “BattleBots,” “Robotica,” and other television shows which collectively have created a sport out of these iron cockfights. Others simply enjoy the competition and the engineering challenge of constructing weapons of little destruction. The Rake’s own Colleen Kruse, the comedian and storyteller who has twice served as an announcer at Mech Wars, calls bot wars “monster trucks for the Mensa set.”

These are the same men who read science fiction, play computer games, refurbish cars, adore Star Trek, and find comfort in the creation of mechanical objects. Along with the adults, there are smart teenagers bored by model airplanes, go-carts, and video games. They’re ready for recreation of a different order, often with the help of parents and siblings. “It’s a neat family project,” says Kruse. “We don’t have occasion to build things together as families anymore, it’s not what people do together. This is a chance to build something without many limits on the imagination.”

Jonathan VanderVelde is not a geek or an engineer but an architect who builds robots as design exercises. A rusty-haired 34-year-old with a rumpled appearance, VanderVelde has an abiding love of fringe cultures that first drew him to battle bots. His resume reveals his variety of passions: He was the lead singer for the power-pop band Zen Bishops. He has written comedy pieces for a local theater company. His interest in battle bots came in part because he saw similar events, chiefly monster truck shows, as “prosaic things” since competitors did not build them from the bottom up. “It could be monster toasters for how much creativity was involved,” he says. “I thought, wouldn’t it be fun to build something to attack and destroy things, where you’d have two teams slugging it out.”