What are your favorite toys for the lake or pool side?

June 4, 2009 12:51 PM

Lake toys! What are your favorite toys for the lake or pool side?

Going to be spending some time at the lake house this summer and I'm looking for some toys that adults and kids would enjoy. We have dock with 13' off the end. Also have an upper deck that we can jump off of.

I was looking at some inflatable or fiberglass slides, maybe an air bag to launch the kids in the air. Water guns and rafts, whatever.

What toys do you keep coming back to?

posted by wrnealis to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (20 answers total)

Not really for the water, but Cornhole is fun to play poolside or lakeside.
posted by Frank Grimes at 12:53 PM on June 4, 2009

Best answer: For the kids: Wacky noodles, water guns and bubble soap. Along with Cornhole, Ladderball (aka Hillbilly Golf)
posted by jquinby at 12:58 PM on June 4, 2009

I desperately wanted to join my elementary school friends at their summer camp in my younger days because they would return with wonderful stories about this thing called "the blob". It was a fantastic contraption (a big blob of....something...inflated plastic?) on the lake, with a dock and upper deck thing (so it sounds like a perfect fit for you!) where you could jump from the dock onto it, and it was big enough that you could bounce around for a bit (it was pre-watered with a hose or something, so it was slick and such) and then someone else would jump on, launching you like a rocket out into the lake.

To this day, it is still a dream of mine to jump around on the blob and get launched into the lake over and over again.

(Deer-run/Brookwoods was the name of the camp, I think)

Wow, apparently this is it.
posted by Grither at 12:58 PM on June 4, 2009 [1 favorite]

For their simplicity, water noodles are a hell of a lot of fun.
posted by bondcliff at 12:59 PM on June 4, 2009 [1 favorite]

Way simple, but sometimes all you want to do is be in the water, chatting or just hanging out. Noodles pretty much can't be beat for that purpose - unless maybe it's one of those fancy noodles with a sling seat attached. In the midst of all your fancy active fun toys, make sure to have some noodles around!
posted by peachfuzz at 1:00 PM on June 4, 2009

Also, hillbilly golf is totally awesome. I tried describing it in a previous thread because I had forgotten the name, and someone else provided relevant links. Luckily that's been done here already.
posted by Grither at 1:01 PM on June 4, 2009

Last year our friend with a lake house in Maine had one of those giant zorb balls that was really fun. Guaranteed to wear the kids out. It looked almost just like this.
posted by mbd1mbd1 at 1:01 PM on June 4, 2009

Additionally, if you're in a pool or don't mind putting the noodle where your mouth is, the ones with holes in them make wonderful water weapons.
posted by Night_owl at 1:05 PM on June 4, 2009

A soccer net (or two cones) and one of those inflatable playground balls. Nothing like a good game of start up water polo.
posted by HabeasCorpus at 1:15 PM on June 4, 2009

My wife and I are in the process of finding a Hobie catamaran for conversion into a kiteboat.
posted by Netzapper at 1:18 PM on June 4, 2009

If there's a tree, nothing beats a good ol' rope swing
posted by gnutron at 1:52 PM on June 4, 2009 [1 favorite]

2nding rope swing.
posted by bonobothegreat at 2:29 PM on June 4, 2009 [1 favorite]

This looks relaxing for the adults. Springfield Special Products makes "The Blob." Rave Sports has all sorts of water playground equipment. A waterproof deck of cards seems like a good idea too.
posted by oceano at 2:43 PM on June 4, 2009

BLOB
posted by MadamM at 3:05 PM on June 4, 2009

Wacker noodles FTW. Infinite fun for all ages!
posted by FatherDagon at 3:15 PM on June 4, 2009

Response by poster: Blob looks like great fun, but maybe alittle out of my price range
posted by wrnealis at 3:52 PM on June 4, 2009

Not sure how they'd hold up in possibly murky lake water, but I recently discovered the Toypedo. Holy crap! Fluid mechanics can be unintuitive and totally awesome.
posted by GPF at 3:52 PM on June 4, 2009

...and by "hold up," I mean, "how well you can see them and appreciate their awesomely strange behavior."
posted by GPF at 3:54 PM on June 4, 2009

Radio-controlled boats can be had surprisingly cheaply these days. If you get one off eBay for $20 delivered, just make sure to make clear to the kids that it's a cheapie, and may not work right, or may get waterlogged and die after five minutes. There's a good chance it'll actually be A-OK, but if you instil in the kids a great sense of gloom about it, they can only be pleasantly surprised :-).

There are also quite a lot of amphibious R/C toys these days (both off-brand Chinese cheapies and freaky, higher-quality things from companies like Tyco). Some of them are hovercraft, which I wouldn't trust on water, but others have paddle-wheels or even screw-drive.

I'd also get a few cheap snorkels and face-masks/goggles. And if you've got a plastics/rubber supply place nearby, try a hefty length of large-diameter clear PVC pipe, with which all sorts of goofing-around/physics-experiments can be done.
posted by dansdata at 5:43 PM on June 4, 2009

Lots of noodles, and some poly rope, so they can build with them. Squirt guns. Once in a while, bring out tons of squirt guns, then put them away for another week. Rafts and tubes are really fun. I live on a lake, and there's a group that hangs out on the lake on tubes loosely lashed together. Looks like fun.

Also, a throwable life ring for the dock is a good safety item.
posted by theora55 at 7:54 AM on June 5, 2009