DangerBoy

@Horton that looked very smooth and effortless. Nice skiing.

I suppose it really doesn't matter but for the sake of accuracy those are not 2006 Monzas. The 2006 was red top and bottom with black graphics on top and bottom as shown in this photo. The 2005 Monza was black with red graphics so maybe those are 2005s. AFAIK, the exact same ski as the '06, just with different graphics. I skied on a '06 for years and loved it. I think they were great skis and I hope they find a good home with someone who will enjoy skiing on them as much as I did mine. http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v457/guitarzan1972/Monza1.jpg

All hail @adamhcaldwell, King Slaloman!

Thanks @BraceMaker. I was puzzling over that too even before @Drago raised the question.

Nice job @bojans! This is something I've wanted to do for a long time. What drone were you using and where were you controlling it from? Were you controlling it manually or using some sort of follow mode?

Thought I'd give this post a bump in case there's someone out there with a rotator cuff tear that could benefit from reading this post. And just as an update, still 100% issue free in the shoulder that had the torn supraspinatus rotator cuff muscle. Did anybody try a Class IV laser on their rotator cuff injuries because of this posting? What were your results?

For anybody who might be interested, just saw a 2019 67" Senate Pro Build used twice go up for sale on SIA. $975 is the asking price. That's a good deal isn't it? ski-it-again.com/php/skiitagain.php?endless=summer&topic=Search&category=Slalom&postid=51197

How about using the opportunity to name your beer by paying tribute to some of the most important legendary ski makers and innovators in the history of the sport? Just spitballin' here: Kidder O'Brien's Concave IPA or Slalom Course IPA or Six Ball IPA or whatever you want to call it Connelly O'Brien's (Your name here) IPA Kidder Connelly O'Brien's (Your name here) IPA or shorten that up to KC O'Brien's (Your name here) IPA - (everyone in the waterski community will know what the KC stands for.) Of these, I like KC O'Brien's the best. It rolls off the tongue pretty nicely and pays tribute to three legends of the waterski industry and also to 5 ski companies who were founded by one of those three men (6 if D3 is actually a different company than Kidder Skis). If you call it KC O'Brien's Concave IPA you not only pay tribute to all three of them you also pay tribute to arguably one of the most important, if not the most important, ski design innovations in the history of the sport. I mean those three gentlemen literally shaped the ski industry and the invention of the concave tunnel changed everything and had a massive impact on the sport. Final Submission: KC O'Brien's Concave IPA - what do you think ballers? Thumbs up or down on this one?

@Rednucleus I'm also not too sure about this idea of doing just 6 (7 if you count the gate) turns and then dropping. Deep water starting's a lotta work y'know! Especially for an old guy like me. ;) Also, we probably do 25 turns before dropping for our halftime rest during our runs. I've just barely gotten warmed up and started making some good turns by turn 7. My first four or five are like the first pancake if you catch my drift. If I want to be at my best, I need to make like 10 turns before entering into the course! I guess that's why you ballers always start at line lengths that're easy for you and work your way up to your hard passes. Too many damn starts though! ;)

Ooh! I know! How about "King Slalomon IPA"? Cartoon pic of a happy king-like dude stretching around a bouy wearing a crown? Seriously, someone should at least take King Slalomon for their moniker on this site. Maybe the dude who routinely runs -41' and makes it look damned easy (@adamhcaldwell) should have that moniker bestowed upon him. I'm DEFINITELY not worthy of it! ;)

@Rednucleus That's what I'm afraid of ;)

Oh, and here's a Salmon water ski for sale in Ontario! :lol: https://kijiji.ca/v-water-sport/ottawa/salmon-water-ski/1432963901

I was thinking along the same lines as @a_bax but was going to suggest 43 Off IPA (or 6 at 43 IPA) instead as that's currently the Holy Grail for the sport right now. Or how about "Dock Start IPA"? The label could have a cartoon drawing of a guy jumping off the dock with his slalom ski mid air between the dock and the water. A funny version of that would make it look like the boat took off way too fast so the skiers arms could be stretched out, the head snapped back with eyes bugged out, hair swept back, things stretched out lots of motion lines behind the skier to show he's literally being yarded off the dock at warp speed, etc. You get the picture. ;)

@Rednucleus LOL thanks for that. The lake we ski on is hundreds of feet deep in most places so it's pretty hard to set up a course anywhere on it. Besides that, it's a large public lake with a lot of boat traffic and since slalom courses are so rarely seen on it, 99.9% of the boaters on it wouldn't know how to recognize a slalom course if they came upon it or what the proper edicate is around them so it's almost certain that any course you could manage set up will get trashed very quickly. The other thing is that we could end up skiing in any one of a number of different locations several miles apart on any given morning (the only time of the day when we can ski during the summer). Where we go to ski on any given morning depends entirely on the wind conditions. If it's a little too "rough" for us (and we're very spoiled and VERY PICKY) right where we are, we know to go to certain locations to find calm water if the wind is coming down the lake and other locations if it's coming from the opposite direction. The lake is so big that there's no one location around us where we could be fairly certain of getting calm water most days so even if we could set up a course somewhere it might not happen all that often that conditions are the way we like them where our course is set up. Having said all that, I know virtually nothing about setting up courses or how portable and easy to set up they are. I assume they need to be anchored in at least a couple of places (like at both ends) to keep them from drifting all over the place and that would be tough to do quickly when we're often skiing in as much as 450 feet of water which we are most of the time. In one place we sometimes ski, the water is about 650 feet deep.

@Stevie Boy No worries and I do appreciate your advice and trying to help. @BraceMaker you're right in that one pic doesn't tell the whole story but over the years I've taken at least a few hundred pics of him cranking turns and I can tell you that pic is quite representative of most of his turns. He comes across the wake pretty neutral on the ski and then throws everything he has into a sudden, quick jarring turn that you certainly feel in the boat and throws up a huge wall of spray. A lot has to happen right in a very short span of time for everything to work out right and most of the time it does but he does tend to fall more often than I do. Often, when he falls, I can hear the twang of all that tension coming off the rope and often see the handle fly past on either side of the boat. I ski differently. My style is smoother and more transitional. I start transitioning onto the inside edge sooner and build angle and pressure over a longer period of time finishing with a fair bit of angle and pressure towards the end of the turn. I stay more forward on the ski (see pic) and carve a lot more smoothly through my turns. I rarely fall, my turns aren't near as jarring and don't throw up as much spray as his even though I outweigh him by 10 lbs or more now. This is me on my '06 Monza (love that ski). I don't always have the water breaking this far forward on my ski on all my turns but I do tend to keep the tip a lot lower and the water breaking a lot further forward than my friend does. I have no idea if this picture shows good form/technique or not but it's my favorite skiing pic for aesthetic reasons. Does this look like I'm doing things right or am I supposed to have more bend at the waist and my shoulders and head more level than this?

Or how about "6 Bouys IPA"? The logo could maybe show something representing a skier's path through a slalom course. Stylize it a bit if you want to make the logo look more upscale and stylish

If you want it to be something fun and light hearted you could call it "Yard Sale IPA" and have a comic type drawing of a slalom skier having a tumble - maybe cart wheeling - over the water, his ski flying one direction, gloves in other directions, shorts coming off (tastefully), tow rope recoiling as it skips across the water towards the boat and of course a huge ball of spray from where the skier has bounced off the water once or twice. This photo that I took of my friend having a yard sale will give you an idea of what I mean. The only things it's missing are the skier's gloves and ski flying through the air. If you get the right artist, it could be a really funny cartoon. Nice bounce eh? Note the shorts half off. You can kind of see the reflection of his butt cheeks in the water underneath him. I was laughing so hard after I snapped the photo I could barely tell the driver the skier was down. He was alright after that epic tumble.

He never has a sore back and all we do is free ski. Hell. I know our technique isn't great. (I think mine is better than his though ;)) We've never had a lesson in our lives but we've been skiing together for maybe 35 years now. He was 63 last year when I took that pic. I'm a bit younger at 57. Pretty much all the people our age that we grew up with in the bay at our lake have quit skiing but we're out on the dock every morning at 7:00 a.m.to get the calm when we're at our cabins and we're still as passionate and enthusiastic about skiing as we were when we were kids. We also love the part that comes afterward when we sit out on his dock in the early morning sun or in his hot tub drinking coffee and Bailey's hashing over the terrific morning of skiing we just had. It's all very civilized, you know. ;) We don't need to tweak our fin and boot settings to get one or two more buoys. For us, it's all about the joy we feel when we're out there on a gorgeous morning shredding up a glass calm lake. We just want to experiment with settings because it's interesting and fun and with a little luck maybe we'll find some setups that work better for us than the ones we're using. I figured if people would tell me some setups that worked great on their Senates we could try those instead of taking a long time to get there using only trial and error.

Just call it "Shred". I think that says everything you need to say in one short word. For the logo, just have a drawing of a skier in dark silouette against a light/white background with one hand on the tow-rope, arm and body extended as far as possible in a cut to get the ski just barely around a buoy. If you want a photographic image for the label, use a dramatic backlit image like this one I took of my friend but use a better skier who's stretched out lower in a much deeper cut like what I described above.

Thanks everyone for chiming in. @Chris Rossi and @Stevie Boy As I said earlier in my OP, my friend tends to wheelie a lot through his turns. Below is a pic of him mid turn on his Senate. See how far back on his ski the water's breaking? I realuze that could just be poor technique/body positioning but wouldn't moving the bindings back further on his ski excentuate that tendency? Maybe I'm not fully understanding how things really work but moving the boots back seems counter-intuitive to me. It seems to me that moving the bindings rearward would make the tail ride even deeper in the water and that would in turn make you have to push harder to smear the tail and get the ski through the turn. I know for myself, when I went from an old 65" HO Mach 1 that I had outgrown to a 67" Monza (HUGE step up in performance), I couldn't turn the Monza at all the first few runs. I couldn't believe how hard it was to turn that ski. I ended up incrementally moving the bindings about as far forward as I could and that made a HUGE difference. (Don't recall if I did anything with the fin.) Thereafter, the Monza handled like a F1 race car. It took very little effort to make it turn while remaining very stable and foregiving and my skiing improved by huge amounts. I probably improved more over the next few years than I did over the previous 15. But this was me on my Monza and not my friend on his Senate. We have different skiing styles (I'm probably more forward on my ski and more transitional and carving in my turns whereas my friend's turns are more abrupt and jarring) so I'm not sure how much of my experience would apply here. So getting back to my friend, if you're saying we should try moving the boot back a little on his Senate to make it turn with less effort I will suggest he try that but I'm just not understanding why that should work and it would go against my perhaps misguided instinct to move the bindings forward to get the tip down, make the ski ride a little flatter and make the tail run a little shallower so it takes less backfoot pressure to make it smear through the turn. Am I way off here? Can you walk me through it a bit from your much more knowledgeable point of view to help me understand where you're coming from on the moving the bindings rearward is likely to make the ski turn easier? I appreciate having the chance to learn from someone such as yourselves.

Another one of my ski buddies has a 2018 67" Senate and would like to try some different fin settings to see what kind of a difference it makes for him. He's on the stock settings now. His ski is an Alloy but we're putting a standard adjustable (HO) fin on it. He skis 22' off in the 32 mph range. IMO he wheelies too much out of his turns so settings that might help him keep the tip a little lower might be what he should try first. I skied on his ski once and it seemed like I had to push a lot harder on the tail to get it to turn compared to the 67" Monza I was skiing on at the time. Anybody got any non-stock setting numbers that might help make the ski a little more nimble/turn a little easier?

Wow, that's an astonishing result @SkiJay! No wonder she's absolutely beaming and grinning from ear to ear. Way to go Sophie! ?? Watch out Regina Jacquess, it won't be long before Sophie's gonna be comin' after ya! :p

Just giving this a bump to see if there's anyone who could possibly suggest some alternative numbers my friend could try on this ski. Even if someone could just suggest which direction we should maybe try heading in would be helpful. I would hope someone out there has experimented with the fin settings on a 69" Senate of that era and could at least tell me in general terms (e.g. shallower/longer or deeper/shorter, more or less DFT, etc.) where they found their sweet spot on the ski even if they don't have the exact measurements available to them any longer.

Here's another thing @SkiJay said to look for in the video. It's hard to catch 'cause the resolution's only good enough to see it in one or two frames. You have to zoom in a lot and go through that part of the video frame by frame even just to glimpse it but I think you can see what I'm looking at pretty clearly in the screen cap below. Do you see it? Exit Gate Frame Grab Zoom

@ozski @Drago @Bruce_Butterfield @Sprayblaster Pardon my untrained eye but these frame captures show exactly what I was looking at on Ball 5 and Ball 6. This is what I was referring to when I said there appears to be a lot of tip pressure as he rounds the turn at those balls. What I see there is the tip being quite low and the water breaking just below the tip. Do you not see that too? Is that not what @SkiJay said to look for in the video? Please educate me if I'm wrong. Ball 5 Ball 6