Cnewbert

Is there a dive club in your area? You could inquire if anyone with an u/w video camera would inspect it for you for a modest amount of money. Most lake areas have police dive teams as well as u/w video cams. Maybe an off-duty officer would do the same.

@DavidN It's for aesthetics. A Milwaukee Tools cordless drill would've clashed with his boot. Details matter at his level.

@MichaelWiebe I'm not that clever I'm afraid. @LoopSki mine too! But a basic platform lift can be an open air installation, under a covered slip, or something very high end like the one in the photo. The lifts themselves are somewhat pricey, but not crazy expensive. And installed in a covered slip might be an affordable option.

Who’s got one? Skis with a friend who has one? Likes? Dislikes? Pros? Cons? Etc. On paper I like the fact you can easily walk around your boat, dry it off after use, wax, polish, maintain… love on it as easily as if it was out of the water on a trailer. One Canadian company in particular has caught my interest: Northshore Waterfront Solutions. http://northshorewaterfront.ca/platform-boat-lifts/ They ship throughout North America. Any feedback on platform lifts in general or Northshore Waterfront Solutions in particular would be appreciated. Thanks!

My next line will be an S line. While their ropes are good, my experience with ML customer service is terrible, so I won't buy another product from them in any case.

@DavidN we sure are! Had to wait out a bit of fog this morning, but once it lifted the skiing was great!

We skied yesterday (Ocala area) and the water was 63˚... getting there! Still Fluid Neos for my wife and I, but then, we're both pretty much like tropical fish and need the water really warm or we die. Maybe tomorrow we'll brave it with just Camaros, as today got really hot. Spring flowers are in bloom everywhere so it won't be long before the hot weather settles in for the season.

The biggest difference re: potential that I see is capacity. A given ski slope, even a small one, can accommodate hundreds of skiers over the course of a day. A large slope on a big mountain can handle thousands, and ski mountains may have dozens of different runs. How many water skiers can a single dedicated ski lake handle daily? Let's assume a meaningful day of slalom skiing might be, say, 3 sets, 6-8 passes per set. So maybe each set is around 15 minutes per skier. Just a single skier might then monopolize the lake for around 45 minutes over the course of the day. There are only so many hours in a day, and even if the boat ran continuously, never stopping for fuel, to change drivers, for lunch... for anything... a ski lake can only handle a very few skiers per day. If there were 12 hours of daylight, this lake could offer just 16 skiers quality ski time. Obviously I've pulled some numbers out of the air to illustrate the problem as I see it. You can double that number of skiers and the fact remains an entire ski lake has very very low skier capacity and the number of dedicated ski lakes is certainly limited. Public lakes might be bigger, but they suffer from rollers generated by other boat traffic, so the number of skiers who can enjoy a quality slalom ski experience on a public lake is also extremely limited. Just waiting for a roller-free window for a single pass can take a while. I just don't see how this sport can accommodate large numbers of participants even if the interest was there.

Just got out for the first time in weeks yesterday, as we've had a stretch of crappy ski weather where we live here in Central Florida. I had to scrape ice off the windshield of my truck 2 days ago. But yesterday, a day later, the air got up to 71˚under sunny skies, though the water had dropped in our recent cold spell to a winter low of 58.6˚since our last time out in mid January. So it was O'Neill Fluid Neo drysuits to the rescue for my wife and I, and we skied in complete comfort.

These are not perfect measurements from my '20, since the engine cover is curved, but they are close for sure. The cover is 58" long, 38" wide and 28" high, give or take a little. The observer seat is 29" wide. The seat itself is 22" deep and the backrest is 18" high. Remember of course the backrest is not 90˚ to the seat, but slants back at an angle. Hope this helps.

@lpskier People laugh when I say my wife and I wear O'Neil Fluid Neo drysuits in Florida winter, but the water does get cold this time of the year... even colder up here than in Orlando, and definitely too cold for us in any case. Without these drysuits we simply wouldn't ski in winter ever. With several overnights of near freezing or temps down into the mid 20s coming this weekend, the water will dip well into the lower 50s I'm sure. That will keep the riffraff off the lake while we'll be comfortably warm in our drysuits.

So I’m sitting in a Quick Lane lobby waiting on an oil change for our truck. TV is playing. (We canceled our Direct TV entirely as we were so alternately disgusted or bored with available content. As a result, I’m out of the loop as to what is currently available to watch). The program playing here in the lobby is a reality show of parking police giving parking tickets to outraged illegally parked drivers. I kid you not. Somehow such a completely and astonishingly inane show can find its way into America’s living rooms on a major network but the beauty, excitement and thrill of water skiing cannot beg air time. Something is missing here and it’s likely more than the need for more personality based content. I’m tempted to blame the decline of Western civilization, but maybe that’s going a bit overboard. Or not.

January 7. No reason not to ski in January… if you live in Florida that is. ?

Ugh! Another socked in morning. Warm air, okay water temp, glassy conditions but limited vis because of the fog… can’t ski if we can’t see!

Beautiful skiing today, Dec 29. Okay, the water is still a bit cool for my liking, but this heat wave should warm it up pretty quickly.

@BraceMaker I think the very split second my Prostar trailer jumps the hitch I’ve immediately entered O Crap territory! ?

I’m wondering (out loud) if by keeping my cables too short it might prevent the break away cable from pulling free during a trailer unhitching episode and activating the trailer brakes, as the short cables might hold the tongue too close to the hitch to allow this action.

I love teak. It takes very little routine care to keep it looking great. I lightly wipe ours with teak oil and a soft cloth once a week. 2-3 minutes maximum time is all it takes.

Safety cables didn’t save the boat and trailer but they may well have saved the lives of other motorists if the trailer didn’t have a break away brake lock.

@MichaelWiebe this is 1.6x, -32. 1.6x might be as great a zoom ratio as I can go and stay in the frame at -28 and -32. But that’s a 20% improvement so I’m happy with that. I’m not sure, but the camera might track somewhat better on a better skier who keeps more tension on the rope. The elimination of parallax is the greatest benefit with my bracket in my view.

@Nickpep22 my hat is off to you! But any colder and you'll have to replace than fin with runners.

@MichaelWiebe the 1.5x zoom test with my new bracket was successful. I never skied out of frame once all morning. I’m higher/wider than the original photo I posted of the unmodified SkiDoc shot at 1.4x and with more room in the frame to spare. I’ll try 1.6x next week.

@skierjp I'm insane with envy! We were measuring 64 again today with our digital thermometer... at the surface. We need to move south!

@MichaelWiebe ha ha.., you’re in a shorty and we’re in our O’Neal Fluid Neo drysuits! 64° water is like the Antarctic to us! Mulberry must be warmer than Weirsdale. More likely, you’re much tougher. Anyhow, lookin’ good! We’re skiing in the morning and I’m going to try 1.5x zoom and see how it goes at -28. We just use manual start/stop so zoom doesn’t reset. Tried voice command but that was an exercise in frustration. Ended up screaming f-bombs at the GoPro and even that didn’t work. No need for a kit… if you have a hacksaw, a vice and a drill you can crank one out in less than a hour. Let me know how it goes.

While I think the Ski Doc is a great product, there were two areas that I felt could be improved. First was the skier tracking, and I detailed a couple of minor things I did to improve that somewhat in my previous posts. The second was the difference in viewing angle of the skier from left to right because the camera’s lens axis does not look straight down the line. Rather, it is mounted 5” off to one side resulting in parallax. That makes it harder to accurately compare your onside and offside since the camera viewing angle is different for each. So I made this simple bracket, and attaching it required almost no modifications of any consequence to the SkiDoc. I removed two of the screws from the underside holding the top and bottom plates together, the ones opposite each other at the sides, 90° from the rope guides. I then drilled those holes from the bottom completely through the top plate. I then used machine screws and nuts to attach the bracket securely. I then removed the original camera mount handle entirely, which only requires removing a single long Allen head machine screw. I offset the GoPro mount on the bracket 3/4” so that the lens is directly over the pylon, completely eliminating parallax. The whole project didn’t take a full hour. So not only is parallax eliminated, the camera tracks slightly better as well, since the COM of the camera is now directly in the center of rotation of the SkiDoc. Eliminating the inertia of the mass of the camera and the camera handle mount from out on that 5” lever reduces the tracking lag a bit more as the Ski Doc responds more readily to the rope movement. The two photos show me at 28 off in both cases. In one, with the Ski Doc unmodified, I am nearly going out of the frame (1.4x zoom). The second shot using my bracket and the same zoom, I am higher the boat yet still well within the frame, possibly allowing the use of a higher zoom. All it took was a piece of 1/8” x 1” aluminum bar, plus two machine screws and nuts and a 1/4/20 machine screw as a tripod screw, plus a vice to bend the aluminum. I should add the Ski Doc can be restored to its original configuration and function in 5 minutes, with only the 2 machine screws and nuts being different than before, and they don’t affect a thing. (For some reason the photos display in a different order than I posted, but you can still see the difference.)