The Waboba Ball - it bounces on water

The lycra skin may seem like an odd choice until you go to catch the ball, when you’ll see how well you can grasp and handle the self drying surface. Throw the near-indestructible inner ball made of the aforementioned breast implant material and it’s slick and hard to catch once it gets wet. The lycra-like surface on the Waboba is just right.

That’s another tale of caution – how you handle the ball will largely determine its longevity. It isn’t designed to be hit with a bat, or against a wall, or to bounce against sharp objects because the integrity of the lycra coating greatly effects the ball’s characteristics and all of those activities will increase the likelihood it will split or puncture.

The internal polyurethane ball is like we said, almost indestructible – dogs which can normally torture-test any ball into submission seem unable to break the Waboba, which has the added advantage of offering a hand-me-down route for any damaged and deskinned Wabobas – throw them to Deefer!

The inventor of the ball of the story is just about getting the "recipy" of the first test ball right, setting up a business, getting international patent rights etc. The story is still developing with new great distributors and partners, new and better versions of the ball, new markets and most of all, more people having fun with waboba on the beaches of the world.

We came across the Waboba Ball in a sports store and at AUS$10.00 (US$8), it was the ideal impulse buy – cheap enough so it didn’t matter if it failed to meet the claims. We get quite cynical in this role and I didn’t expect it to be that much different to throwing a tennis ball, but I was wrong. It is fantastic. You can’t help but reflect on how a series of small change to the humble ball can make it so much fun compared to any of the permutations and combinations of construction, density, and consistency we’ve seen of the humble and elegant orb prior to now and apart from being an ideal toy, we think it has great potential as a promotional item for any water-related company.

The reason it changes things so much is that it bounces on water – hard to fathom until you have done tried it, but an entirely new phenomenon due to the unique physical attributes of the Waboba Ball.

The simplest way to have fun with a Waboba Ball is to throw it so that it bounces on the water between you and a friend. It reacts slightly to the particular water surface it bounces off, so bouncing it in surf or even small waves varies the angle enough to require some fine-tuning of your hand-eye coordination to catch it, and it has enough weight so that it maintains a lot of its momentum when it bounces, meaning it carries a fair distance and comes through much quicker then you initially expect.

Whilst the Waboba is most fun in waist deep water, making it the ideal beach toy, it’s just as effective in the pool or anywhere else you can find water. The only problem with using it in the pool is that it bounces so well and travels so fast that you spend a bit too much time getting out of the pool to fetch it.

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