Boomerang Bay at King's Island

Boomerang Bay is the water park attached to King's Island in Mason, Ohio. There is no extra fee to attend Boomerang Bay. In other words, it's paid for with your park admission. However, there are costs for lockers, but you typically get your deposit back when you turn your key in after using your locker. Then there's always the extra cost of forgotten towels and snacks and drinks. But it is a free park, so if you plan ahead, you can keep it that way.

Boomerang Bay is an excellent water park...in theory. It has great rides. A lot of great rides actually, with fast moving lines. It's well laid out, and even when the park is at capacity, it doesn't have a suffocating feeling that most parks have when they're full. But lately, Boomerang Bay has been quite hit or miss. Last year, King's Island changed hands. It went from being owned and operated by Paramount to being owned and operated by Cedar Fair. So last year was the first season that it was under this new management.

There were noticeable changes in the running of Boomerang Bay that were less than desirable. For starters, the park was not nearly as clean as it used to be. The locker room floors and bathrooms were disgusting and smelled like sewage. The water in the lazy river was, and I'm not exaggerating, absolutely ice cold. There were rust marks on almost all of the rides that we visited and every once in a while that faint smell of sewage would waft over from the locker rooms. At least, I hope and pray that's where the smell was coming from and not the water from the rides themselves.

Here's the thing. It's still a water park and the rides were still fun. So if you could just take away your need to go to the bathroom or use a locker, you could probably live with the freezing cold water and the less than enthused looking employees placed sparsely around Boomerang Bay.

I can also forgive this lackluster first year because it was under new management. Perhaps they have not yet learned the finer art of water park ownership. Maybe they weren't prepared for the rust stains, maybe they didn't know that gum wrappers, pennies, and bits of grass and rock would collect at the bottom of the wave pool. Maybe they scrimped a little on the toilet cleaner. (Here's a hint for this year, skip the generic and go straight for the good stuff.)

My hope is that this year they'll train more chipper employees, learn the ropes, and I can return to my beloved shiny Boomerang Bay. While it's true that I will no longer see images of my precious Crocodile Dundee at the park thanks to Paramount's vanishing act, maybe, just maybe, I can enjoy a little cleanliness. One can even hope for at least 10 percent less classic rock, but one doesn't want to push it, now does one?