Supplement to the promo boat poll...

[klindy]

@elr ZO doesn't care if the buoys are half as close as they are suppose to be. It holds the speed over 259 meters regardless of where the buoys are. So a bad time with ZO is impossible.

[MillerTime38]

@RazorRoss3 did not mean to offend you but C tournament scores should already have an asterisk by them because the only time you know everything is legit is at a record (Boat path video). Which is why I voted to have ZO for this pull because records should require it

 

Access to water is not going to get any easier so there needs to be other ideas discussed to try and help the sport attract new members and tournament skiers. If it means making class C tournaments more "lax" then that is fine with me but if the sport continues to let the boat manufacturers dictate the rules so they can sell more $70,000 boats and price out the average Joe then we are in big trouble. My last nationals (2015) my dad came and watched and said "Wow waterskiing is becoming a rich mans sport" which is exactly what has happened

 

Next thing someone is going to tell me I cannot ski any more tournaments with my D3 X7 because it is too old and I have to buy a new ski to enter tournaments....

 

[Wish]

I think that says it all. It's becoming a rich mans sport..hmmmm..elitist perhaps. I'll add.."to compete in" to the sentence. It's hard for me to justify even entry fees these days let alone a ZO boat. Blessed to find a house on a lake in Orlando that I could afford but that came with blood sweat and tears..literally. Access is an issue no doubt.

 

Plenty have read my previous post, so guessing no takers on hosting a tournament that costs less and has less hastle all the way around.

 

INT died because of support, and a level of being meaningless to AWSA as it is all internal scores and not anything that goes into the books.

 

I find it ironic that we want to and for the most part have pushed/forced a bunch of skiers into MM with rules that govern them but no sense of looking down the rankings and attempting to include skiers that would prob like an INT-ish laxed format tournament that DOES go into the score books (with rules ..aka.. penalties). We were so willing to put the top skiers in their place.. carigory/group/ so we all have a chance in our divisions (everyone gets a trophy feel) but to scared to allow a boat with a PP (skier penalty and a suckier pull) to enter into the scores because the skier might do better then us. Just how elitist and insecure are we??? Food for thought...?

 

With Marcus Brown and HO trying to breath life back into recreational, fun, lake life skiing vs tubes and boards, I wonder what his spin would be. Are we to close off options or open them? Seems like he's growing the sport from the bottom up while the AWSA and boat manufactures attempt to grow the sport in a direction that seems unclear and unsuccessful in tournament participation.

[elr]

@klindy - don't surveyed/measured courses alleviate the virtual timing problem? The difficulty with PP was that within driving a few sets a competent novice driver could purposely pull a slow in-tolerance time. If a novice driver could do that a rated driver should be able to drive around a small tolerance.

[klindy]

@elr correct. A 259m surveyed course should allow the speed control to match the buoys. But there are lots and lots of tournament courses that have always been class C and never surveyed. Likewise I'd guess hundreds of practice only sites that haven't been surveyed.

 

My point was however that the actual buoys are irrelevant to the timing system.

[Wish]

Wait.. We are piling on the idea of PP being a bad idea because of tolerances and "there are lots and lots of tournament courses that have always been class C and never surveyed". Ok, all your arguments regarding allowing PP have just been tossed out the window. ;-) But seriously I think that PP at least any that run on magnets should be excluded for the fact that if a boat like that traveled, the site would have to have magnets. At least that's a lagit reason. Guessing The good docs course was only surveyed on days he did not ski...?..haha.

 

[jdarwin]

The point of this poll was to determine how many "tournament" skiers ACTUALLY prefer a current year boat opposed to any other configuration: 6%. Wow. I realize the sample is small and unscientific from a polling perspective but I believe the results do highlight a deficiency in AWSA's towboat requirements. In the face of diminishing availability of promo boats AND the membership's willingness to "accept" older towboats at tournaments, it makes sense for the AWSA Rules Committee / Towboat Committee to address this topic. Question is: Will they?

[skiinxs]

My opinion would differ depending on who was maintaining the older boats. Heck, I have found current year boats when checking in at tournaments that obviously had the original oil filter, close to 200 hours, and oil barely on the dipstick that looked like tar. Although that is definitely the exception, not the norm, I would hate to see boats like that after a few years use. (by the way, in that circumstance I would not put the boat in without the owner adding oil to the full mark, but that didn't fix the fact that it had missed multiple oil changes). The first things to affect skiing on older boats would be stiff steering, (old cables, no grease in fittings, packing old and stiff, rudder port old, sticky grease) possible non-standard or damaged props causing the wake and pull to be different, bent rudders, older versions in ZeroOff (but I could fix that on-site as long as I had enough lead time to get unlock codes and upgrade files). I wouldn't hesitate to ski behind a well maintained older boat, but there would be lots more variation depending on condition.