H2OkieNC

Did not go New Year's Day, but skied today in NC, water around 50, air may have got to 60. Trying to ski through the winter for the first time to maintain some rhythm til spring.

I have gone back and forth. In 2020, I switched from straight to radius mid season (so presumably my skiing was about the same) and pain shifted from top of right arm to bottom of left arm. Don't know why. (I am RFF so right palm is down, left palm is up).

Agree with @LoopSki that open water skiing will never be the same. I still free ski, but now whenever I'm free skiing, I'm thinking about working on something to help me run more buoys. Be prepared for the fact that, depending on your open water technique, running six buoys on a full course is a significant achievement that could seem dang near impossible at first. The mini course is great for helping you see your progress and giving you encouragement as you work towards the full course. I haven't been to a ski school since college, but they definitely work with all levels. I would probably contact several, tell them about your experience and what you are looking for, and go with whichever one you get the best feeling about from talking to them.

Looks like I need to buy a new front binding soon. I've got some wakeboard bindings I like that I don't use soap with, anybody have slalom bindings they don't use soap with? (No, I am not interested in going to hard shell right now)

@oldkier that is interesting, 49 mph max seems the right ballpark. If you could see more higher resolution data of only the time in the course, would be even more interesting.

I think I'm with @BobF and @DaveD. When I tried to model handle path, it seemed to me that the most EFFICIENT skier at a given boat speed/line length would have the lowest max speed and the highest min speed (this may relate to being "light on the line"?). This wouldn't necessarily go with the best buoy count, but if you are comparing two skiers with same size, strength, weight, I would think the one with lowest max speed and highest min speed theoretically has POTENTIAL to run more buoys. Something like this should be a more useful metric than rope tension, as high rope tension seems like inefficiency to me.

I watched the video on swing arc by @JoelHowley and was inspired to model the handle path as a pendulum being pulled at constant boat speed. I saw the GUT that @Horton posted, but it didn't look like it went this far. Anybody else out there done this, or something similar? I graphed the results and will try to attach screenshot of the model at 34 mph 35 off. For now I assumed the skier just got the handle to 11.5 m width at the peak of the swing arc but this could easily be changed. This may be pretty academic and not super practical, but an ambitious vision would be to use it to calculate the "optimal" path in terms of minimizing speed or acceleration or rope tension.