There was a ride called the cannonball loop at the front of the park.
"The Cannonball Loop was not fun", he recalled later. "It was more like a ride you ride to survive than to have fun."
-Andy Mulvahill on Wikipedia
It wasn't designed by engineers, they just sent test dummies down the slide and every time the test dummy came out dismembered or decapitated, they would make slight changes to the design. Eventually when they started coming out in one piece, Gene Mulvahill paid $100 to any kid who dared to try it first.
In 1983,[48] GAR built an enclosed water slide with a complete vertical loop at the end, similar to that of a roller coaster.[49] The resulting slide, called the "Cannonball Loop", was so intimidating that employees have reported they were offered $100 (equivalent to $299 in 2025) to test it. Fergus, who described himself as "one of the idiots" who took the offer, said, "$100 did not buy enough booze to drown out that memory."[44]
The slide was open for only a month in 1985 before it was closed at the order of the state's Advisory Board on Carnival Amusement Ride Safety, a highly unusual move at the time. One worker told a local newspaper that "there were too many bloody noses and back injuries" from riders.[2] Some early riders came back with lacerations to their bodies, whose cause was later determined to be teeth that had been knocked out of riders' mouths and become lodged in the interior walls.[10]: 12:30 A former Navy physician found that riders were experiencing as much as nine Gs of acceleration as they went through the loop.[10]: 12:50
A story widely rumored and reported in Weird NJ was that some of the test dummies sent down before it opened had been dismembered and decapitated.[2] Gene Mulvihill's son Andy confirmed that to The New York Times in 2019. He was the first live person to test the ride afterwards, which he did wearing a full set of ice hockey protective equipment.[50] "The Cannonball Loop was not fun", he recalled later. "It was more like a ride you ride to survive than to have fun."[42]
A rider also reportedly got stuck at the top of the loop due to insufficient water pressure, and a hatch had to be installed at the bottom of the slope to allow for future extractions.[2] Those who rode the Cannonball Loop have said that more safety measures were taken than was otherwise common at the park. Riders were weighed, hosed down with cold water, instructed to remove jewelry, and then carefully instructed in how they had to position their bodies to complete the ride.[51]
The ride reopened a few more times over the years. In the summers of 1995 and 1996, it was opened for several days before further injuries forced its permanent shutdown. For the remainder of the park's existence, Cannonball Loop remained visible near the entrance of Waterworld. It was dismantled shortly after the park closed.
