Barefoot waterskiing? It’s food for the sole

SKIMMING along the Nambucca River at 70km/h on his bare feet is how Phil Butler gets his kicks.

Young at heart: Phil Butler. Picture: James Horan

SKIMMING along the Nambucca River at 70km/h on his bare feet is how Phil Butler gets his kicks.

“You roar along with a big rooster’s tail of spray shooting up behind you,” the 69-year-old enthuses. “The sensation of speed is incredible.” He learnt to waterski barefoot in his 20s, and taught his four daughters; it’s how they spent quality time together after a hard day’s work on their beef farm by the river. Lately it’s been a way to stay in touch with his vital, red-blooded self as old age approaches. “It challenges my balance and my reactions, and gives me an adrenalin rush,” he says. “It’s how an old fogey like me reminds himself that life isn’t passing him by.”

This photo was taken on a special day last November. See that bulging left kneecap? He’d just learnt that cancer had taken hold in there; he was going under the knife at Sydney’s Royal Prince Alfred in two days’ time. “I knew there was a good chance I might lose the leg, if not my life,” he says. So he spent this day doing what he loved most, fully aware it could be the last time.

Butler and his wife Marilynn, who met through the Salvation Army, were early sea-changers; 33 years ago they left Canberra, where he had an electronics business, for this farming property on the NSW coast. In the early days they didn’t even have a tractor, so they’d drag a harrow behind the family car - a 1960s Mercedes. “The locals thought we were mad,” he says. But he built the place up, and his roots go deep; in hospital, all he could think about was “feeling the grass under my feet again”.

He didn’t lose the leg. They got the cancer out and made him a new kneecap from a flap of calf muscle; he’s doing chemo now. “There’s a light at the end of the tunnel,” Butler says. Of course, the doctors say he shouldn’t do any more barefoot waterskiing. He’s hardly going to listen to that, though, is he?