smanski

That was the coolest waterski video I have ever seen. Great job.

It is ridiculous to zero them for a miss on the late side or a no continuation on the early exit. I see that happen here and there when someone overshoots on the pullout or lean locks out of 6. I saw a B3 skier miss the entry gates on the late side at 28 off and still run the pass. None of the judges zeroed his gates. I am a proponent of starting to the left of the 55s and ending to the right of the 55s and scrapping the entry and exit gates.

The 15 is noticeably quieter inside than the 14.

Cobweb brush from Home Depot. More bristles (denser) would be better.

I went through 3 bad pucks on my 2015 and finally the 4th was good. It was a horrific pull with the bad pucks.

I was playing around with the Google Maps and noticed you could see the buoys on our lake. For the heck of it, I used their measurement tool to measure turn buoy to turn buoy. To my surprise, the measurement was 47.05m, which is well within the range of 46.776m and 47.246m. I made a few more measurements and all were within tolerance. It seems you could do a very accurate survey with photos from a drone cam. Has anyone tried it?

In the video, he missed the gates on his 43 off pass. That would be a bummer to get your gates pulled on a record setting pass. He definitely makes you want to try the ski.

While watching the video, I figured out her secret. You use a ski that matches your height. Does anyone have a spare 72" slalom ski?

For the Memphis area tournaments, when you ski at Summers Lake, you are skiing in the Southcentral Region. Hilliard's (Crews) lake is in TN and is in the Southern Region, but Summers Lake is across the state line in MS. We have 2 tournaments before Regionals (late May and late June) and 1 after Nationals at the end of August. Roebuck can give you the exact dates. Cedar Ridge (Jackson, MS) also runs class C tournaments along with most of their record tournaments.

It is nice to see some meaningful comments, positive or negative, rather than just "Shut up and go away".

....or imagining if we quit belly aching about the gates.

I can't wait to see the comments about imagining if we didn't have turn buoys or didn't have to go around them or moved them in 10 feet.

Imagine if the slalom course entrance rules had been written differently and the gates were positioned in a way to allow a much broader choice of paths to 1 ball. Shortline skiers would be taking a path very close to the one they do now, but longer line skiers would typically be crossing the centerline earlier than the they do now with the current gates. Now imagine the arguments you would hear if we tried to implement the current gates. Everyone would be screaming that different line lengths take a different path to ball 1 and it is ludicrous to implement a system that would force everyone to cross at pretty much the same point. I believe nearly 100% of the skiers would argue against implementing our current entrance gate system because it is truly ludicrous.

Let's add gates for jump. In jump, no matter what boat speed or how many cuts, put a set of gate balls at some point before the jump and force everyone to go between them. Who cares if it changes the path the jumper would naturally take, make him go between those freaking buoys. If he is one inch off center to the wrong side and jumps 200+, who cares. It doesn't count because he missed some arbitrary buoy by one inch. Maybe add some exit gates also. Who cares if he rides it out. If he doesn't pass through the exit gates his 200+ jump counts as a big fat zero.