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Remember scrounging in the wet sand as a child, feeling the water wash over your toes, looking for a flat stone that was perfect for skipping? Remember the glee you felt when it zipped along the water instead of kerplunking straight to the bottom?

Skipping stones is an almost universal childhood experience, and it's practiced worldwide. The English call it "ducks and drakes" and the Danish refer to it as "smutting." Stones have even been skipped on ice and smooth sand. So Drew Ayers and Andrew Palmer thought it was the perfect activity for a Carleton club. "Everybody's done it or at least tried to. We thought it would be fun to have a club that could skip together," Ayers says. Hence was born the Carleton Stone Skipping Society.

Seeking inspiration, Ayers and Palmer read The Secrets of Stone Skipping by world-champion skipper Jerdone Coleman McGhee, who once sent a stone flying along a river 38 times. They created a ritual for the club's skipping challenges, based partly on advice from McGhee (always do arm warm-ups to avoid elbow fatigue) and partly on stone skipping lore (open the ceremonies with the traditional stone skipping cry of "Let he who is without Frisbee cast the first stone"), and including an original Carleton element (end the event by throwing a rock into the lake, thus giving it the chance to become a smooth stone).

So far, the Stone Skipping Society's challenges have attracted about six dedicated skippers seeking the perfect combination of plinkers and pitty-pats. That's stone skipping speak for a series of clean-cut beginning skips followed by rapidly occurring end skips. "You really want to avoid a crest-out or a plonk," says member Ashley Moseman, who has been skipping stones since he was a kid and regularly achieves 15 skips with a good stone. A crest-out hits the top of a wave and shoots straight up in the air, while a plonk sinks without skipping once.

The group uses Lyman Lakes for its meets, but Ayers admits it's not the ideal location. "We've pretty much picked the area clean of stones, so we've taken to documenting our skips in bodies of water around the world." Last year, he skipped stones in the Aegean Sea, and others have photographed themselves practicing the ancient art in France and Ireland. "That's the beauty of stone skipping," Moseman says. "You can do it anywhere there's water and available stones." But if you try it, avoid the rogue. It's a rock half buried in the sand that's masked as a perfect, flat stone, but sure to be a plonker.