Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

We had occasion to be in Rochester over the weekend so we decided to check out Rochester's charming, quirky small lakeside amusement park, Seabreeze. This is a former trolley park like Canobie Lake Park--even older and smaller, but with a better waterpark. We got rained on for the first several minutes we were there, but the weather cleared up rapidly and it was great for the rest of the day, partly sunny, not too hot.

The day seemed to begin inauspiciously between the rain and our struggles with the locker rental system, which, to our surprise, was cash-only (many parks these days have moved away from even accepting cash in the park). I looked at a park map and was dismayed to find that the only ATMs were all the way at the other end of the park... then realized that Seabreeze is so small that "all the way at the other end" was about a minute's walk. Busch Gardens, this isn't. So this was easily sorted.

The prime attraction for me at this park is one of the oldest operating roller coasters in the world (its precise priority is hard to keep track of, because of the varying operating status of its rivals): the 1920 Harry Baker/John A. Miller woodie, Jack Rabbit. Here's Coaster Thrills' POV:



This is a surprisingly good ride, very smooth these days though not super forceful, comparable in size and experience to Canobie's Yankee Cannonball. But it's got a more interesting layout than Yankee Cannonball: an out-and-back that crosses under itself on the return leg, then turns into a helix that enters a long tunnel, which contains a hidden drop in the dark. Ending with a hidden drop is basically the same trick pulled by the last ride I rode before this, Busch Gardens Williamsburg's famous hypercoaster Apollo's Chariot! But it's hidden in a different way. In plain sight, really, given that you can see the dip in the tunnel if you're looking in the right direction earlier in the ride. The layout makes creative use of the hilly terrain in the area.

Jack Rabbit may have been the first coaster ever to have upstop wheels, the devices under the track that keep the coaster from flying off with negative g-force. It was one of the earliest, at the very least--designer John A. Miller had patented them the previous year.

Even the station is an amazingly old-school experience, with no air gates at all on the entrance queues, and long wooden manual brake levers. These last are somewhat for show: over the 2020 shutdown (during which, a fellow fan was excited to tell me, they held some employee rides just so they could say it was still "continuously operating" since 100 years earlier), they upgraded the control system to a modern computer-operated one, so those brake levers are functionally just switches that are redundant with buttons on the control panel. But the ride ops do use them (and then walk right across the track to operate said control panel).

Next to Jack Rabbit is Seabreeze's peculiar log flume, recorded here by Jay Ducharne:



This thing was apparently a 1980s replacement for a 1950s vintage flume called Over the Falls that, among other things, had a stinky-water problem. They retained Over the Falls' unusual drop, which is of ordinary size but is profiled more like a coaster drop, with a maximum steepness of 55 degrees, which actually makes it kind of scary. I'm pretty sure it's the steepest ride drop that I've ridden with no restraint system whatsoever (not counting body waterslides). Since much of the ride is below ground level, the lift is also taller than the drop to increase the anticipatory freakiness. Unlike some flumes, they don't even bother maintaining the illusion that your log is floating in water on this drop--it's just riding down a dry chute on its road wheels.

My wife and kid had been at the water park while I was on these rides, and I went over there and checked out their fine lazy river (I caught them just coming off of it) and the surprisingly powerful wave pool. Then we got together and saw a bit of an impressive circus show on the midway, with a juggler and a high-wire act. My kid wanted to ride Jack Rabbit with me but first, we worked up to it by trying Seabreeze's most unusual ride, Bobsleds (Coaster Thrills' video here):



This thing was first built in 1954 in substantially different form and is sometimes semi-seriously described as a hybrid conversion. I'm not sure it was technically a woodie prior to its makeover in 1961, but apparently someone from Seabreeze experienced Disneyland's Matterhorn Bobsleds and decided to upgrade it to make it taller, and apply both the bobsled theme and the new technology of tubular steel rail. The result is a kind of wild little ride that small kids can go on. It's charming and quirky, and the one thing to watch out for is that if you're an adult, the lap bars may hit you in the belly instead of on the lap, so don't staple yourself (you also have a seat belt). It also has a few little mini-hills before the lift, a feature I associate with intense RMC hybrids.

We then rode Jack Rabbit together and got another ride on Bobsleds. My kid approved of both rides. She's becoming a wooden-coaster fan--she doesn't go for the big steel, but these rides are a great thing to be into.