Radio Rental · Tenderfoot TV & Audacy

Episode 66

·40 min·3 clips

A wakeboarder sees a strange water surge and his father's frozen, quivering face as a shark circles nearby.

The store bit starts loud. Someone is stuck behind a door with beans and monsters, because the Radio Rental shop has its own problem going on. Then the tape settles down. The guest tells a wakeboarding story that starts as normal water-sport stuff and turns into the kind of parental fear that hits before words do. A rope is coming in. The guest points toward the water, ready to jump back in for the wakeboard they left behind. The father moves first. He stands up, grabs the guest by the shoulder, and pulls them back into the boat before there is room to argue. His answer is one word. He looks right at the guest and says no, and that is enough because they both understand more than they want to. They leave the wakeboard. On the ride home, once the adrenaline fades, the fear lands. Both of them are shaken and misty eyed. The explanation takes a couple of weeks. A neighbor who has lived there her whole life hears the story, drops the sweet-old-lady warmth, and tells them never to swim there again. The water has a secret. Saltwater meets freshwater there, and tiger sharks use it as a breeding and feeding ground. That detail makes the whole memory worse. The guest learns why people fear those sharks there: circling, ripping, mauling, taking pieces slowly. The local stories are brutal. Dogs have disappeared from pontoons, including one that went under and never came back up. Then comes the part that really sticks. A couple of years before the wakeboarding trip, a girl swimming with her father died there after a tiger shark attack.

As heard by us

A theatrical opening gives way to a wakeboard story that turns ordinary water into a real threat.

Radio Rental begins with familiar theatrical storefront banter before settling into a first-person wakeboard story that drifts into shark-country dread.

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Why you'd press play

A video-store welcome turns into a wakeboard brush with a tiger shark.

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