Cam

@Ed_Johnson I am with @Horton here, my thinking is if you feel you have got it on your onside and haven't pre released I would expect you should now just be putting on the same pressure on your offside and should have no problem.

The only reason I comment is I have had a 750 Reflex spring break on me and two 404s break at the weld and all happened right behind the boat like your crash so maybe worth checking your spring.

This fin broke on my HO Phantom at less than a year old found it in the lake a few years later, @Horton said there was a batch of them from that era that were breaking.

@LeonL I have had video coaching from TW & Skijay this year but that is still a work in progress, just trying to find out if any skiers at my level have benefited from a ski change when they dropped the speed and as @Dirt says make it easier for me to work on technique.

This is my 2nd year at 32 mph the 1st was better but the ski I was on broke so I went back to my previous ski.

When I skied at 34 mph my norm was mid -32, now at 32 mph it is low -32 so was wondering if any older skiers had found success moving to a larger ski of the same model or a top of the mid range ski?

I have had some good advice from @twhisper and @SkiJay on this but am wondering what other older guys have done that worked when dropping speed.

Another little gift to hinder my training.

@Wish that is fine.

@lakeaustinskier my advice is about preventative maintenance on Wish's new unit, my comments above were to buy a new unit to replace the seized one and not to repair it.

Cam

@Wish I use the grease we pack our rudder with at the beginning of the season and just check the release settings once a month, if you have just moved to Reflex the screw from 2015ish will be stainless steel so less chance of corrosion.

Corrosive properties of the water you ski in should also be taken into consideration for your maintenance schedule.

@Wish, picture attached is of the corroded internals of a Reflex, you can see a nut that should have lugs to connect to the chrome part on the left but these are corroded away and caused a catastrophic failure on this unit.

No matter what you do to free your friends Reflex off it will still have a lot of corrosion and be more likely to fail in the future and possibly injure the skier.

As far as I am aware Reflex only sell the spring and screw as replacement parts so if there is corrosion on the nut you will still be looking at a possible future failure, so I would advise buying a new unit and keeping it lubricated with waterproof grease.

Written by someone who has had 3 reflexes break while skiing which were 3 of the 4 worst falls I have had in 30 years of skiing.

Don't beat yourself up too much it happens to most of us at our level, I know guys who can go straight back into running buoys after months off.

Personally I can't so early season or when my standard drops as it gets colder I always free ski my first couple of passes starting early and turning before the buoys to try to find a rhythm before I try to turn some buoys and if I don't I will free ski the whole set.

When free skiing I also like to have someone in the boat being super critical on my stack as this is always the first thing to break down with me.