andjules

It would be interesting to see the pricing and sales data on the Moomba Outback over the years it was available. As pointed out above, it was probably the last popular direct drive ski/family-hybrid boat that was priced a significant notch below the big 3 (the gekkos were never popular, at least in my neck of the woods). It would also be interesting to see the growth in wakeboard/surf boats from the early 90s to today (when it peaked, the degree to which it has slowed) and compare that to industry trends for family runabouts. It seems to me that family-oriented ski boats faced increasing pressure in the face of wakeboard/surf interest, to the point of near-extinction by 2010. But over the same time, the cost of ski & surf boats inflated well past the general rate of inflation (probably due to shrinking volumes and a cultural shift away from "lake life" vacationing). It sure seems to me (without industry data on hand) that wakeboard/surf boat pricing has gotten out of hand and sales have slowed, making me wonder if the conditions that led to the demise of the Outback have eased up at all. I realize this post is going in a different direction than the rest of this thread (which is focused on a tourney-skier's single-purpose slalom tug), but it seems to me that a low-cost boat either has to: (i) have a broad enough appeal to sell enough volume to compensate for low volumes; or (ii) (if it's going to be a dedicated shortline-slalom boat) be a garage-based labour-of-love by semi-hobbyists who don't care (or are delusional about) the potential to scale volume.

@Horton I think we are actually making fun of ourselves, not samanskis. At least I am.

He really should move his front binding up 1/16". He'd be so much happier inside.

The more I think about this, the more I agree with @Horton: this essentially was attempted, it was called a Centurion Carbon Pro, and it didn't really sell well enough. I don't think a startup could make it work out of the gate (and out of a garage), even if they went with a factory-direct model (which would keep the cost down, but would also impede sales & volume). I'd love to see one of the big 3 go in the other direction, like I mentioned above, narrower beam, smaller, lighter boat and a lower price tag. But essentially that was the Carbon Pro. @fu_man I agree, the Moomba Outback was an excellent experiment in the other direction: family/ski hybrid, lower price, nicely done without luxury, absolutely adequate for anyone but the most hard-core , top-tier pro.

@rlyons124 honestly, for your needs — and despite the fact that I love the Sunsetter LXi —I'd take an '08 Response over an '00 Sunsetter. I think the slalom wake, the wakeboarding wake, and the roominess are all slightly better on the Sunsetter than the Response, but it's negligible. And the tower is a nice touch. The weird part is the hours. Is it a mistake? Has it just been re-upholstered? I've never seen a boat with 2k hours that isn't also banged up and aged in every other way.

@hemlock I'd mostly agree about 3-event (or slalom-focused) boats in the last 20 years. But it's not as true of crossover boats. Most family-friendly crossover boats in the last 20 years put wakeboarding ahead of slalom, and were big-and-heavy enough that the slalom wakes at anything slower than 32 were often terrible.

@rlyons124 I'd say no comparison, 99-03 Sunsetter LXI is a way better slalom (and maybe everything-else) boat vs PS209. And that's not me being a Malibu fanboy. I love a good Mastercraft "single purpose" boat (e.g. slalom or wakeboarding), but I'd say their attempts at hybrid/crossover boats have been universally 'meh'.

One observation is that (a) many, many people on this site (and we are a minority in the larger market) ski on private sites in club-like settings with 1-3 (max) people in the boat, never using the boat to cruise around with the family; and (b) particularly in the mid 90s, ski boat design evolved to satisfy growing interest in wakeboarding, and became more-and-more family oriented (wider beam, higher freeboard, leading to heavier weights, and more "comfort"/solidity). The point I'm trying to make is that for a lot of us, going back to a barebones 2200lbs, 88" beam boat with ~ 300hp would actually suit our needs better (imagine a mid-80s Mastercraft with a 5.0L ZO and a few wake & spray refinements). But we've been spoiled by the luxurious feel of these wide, heavy, powerful boats (would be like switching from a GMC Suburban to a mid 90s Mazda Miata). Side note: when Toyota had their short-lived experiment in tournament ski/wakeboard boats, their boats were powered by a marinized 4.0L aluminum block Lexus. Didn't have quite the low-end power (but who actually wants/needs a stronger hole shot?!), but they used about half the fuel of a classic 5.7L.

I agree with the two posts above: while they're pretty close, I preferred the (larger!) Sunsetter LXi to the Response LXi (although, at this point all Sunsetter LXis are 15-19 years old), and owned the former for several years. @Wayne the PS190 is a great slalom boat, but not nearly as nice a family boat compared to Response LXi/FXi or Sunsetter LXi. @rlyons124 are you on a public lake? do you go out on the lake with kids for an hour or two, or just take sets off the dock? @rlyons124 back to your question, you can tell the difference between a Malibu "wake" and "diamond" hull by the "lifting chines" at the outside edges of the diamond hull, which keep the boat higher/"lighter", resulting in a softer wake. Look at the back left corner of the white boat below (diamond hull) vs the back right corner of the orange boat (wake hull).

I don't think $40k can be done anymore, but that doesn't mean $100k should the only price point for new. That said, between the used market (for most of us?), and a handful of wealthy customers (who'll complain, but ultimately seem) willing to spend ~$80-100k, I'm not sure there is much of a space for a $50 or $60k boat from a garage startup and likely to feel very barebones. The first reviews for a startup would of course be silly stuff like "the driver's seat isn't as nice as the Nautique" and "the hole shot seemed a little weak" and the next thing you know it's just seen as inferior.

Well, at least in simple, prototype mode, the metawear stuff would just be recording the data to download and sync up later. I believe it can broadcast in real-time, but that adds some complexity.

@dchristman very, very cool. I wonder if a better roll sensor + some data noise reduction would get closer to what you were hoping for.

If you want to do some intermediate to advanced-intermediate wakeboarding on a primarily-slalom boat, (like many commenters above) I think this is where Malibu really outshines the other boat companies, mostly thanks to the versatility that the Wedge provides. Unless (a) you're a really advanced wakeboarder, (b) you're really into wakesurfing, or © you or your crew or your significant other is dead set on the interior layout that comes with V-drives... I'd stick with a direct drive. They killed the awesome Sunsetter LXi at the end of 2003, but introduced the slightly-smaller Response LXi the same year - they're both a little more "family": walk-through bowrider, wider beam. If you go out with your crew on a public lake and ski out of the boat for a couple of hours, you'll want one of these. If you mostly ski off the dock with a smaller boat crew, I'd stick with the Response LX.

A couple of resources, one cheap, one not: - Metawear sensors: pretty flexible, fairly simple-to-program, can record at a fairly high frequency (although the trade off is the amount of data that can be stored). I think ski roll combined with line angle and line load vs acceleration/deceleration would be interesting to study. - Footbed sensors: Originally part of a downhill ski system; it would be great to study the pressure differences at different stages - front vs back foot, as well as fore vs aft vs inside particularly in the front foot.

@Wish I almost posted that TW @ 1/4 speed video near the beginning of this discussion. It's subtle-but-interesting to compare his -32 and -39 passes; he seems to hold his downswing edge a little longer at -39 (the "power zone" is so short), but at the same time, the edge change happens more quickly. It's also amazing to watch his body at the transition: knees and elbows move a lot, but shoulders/torso are almost perfectly still.

The word "pull" is like the word "love": it has a lot of different meanings in a lot of different contexts (e.g. "I love steak, cats, my child, Jesus, and Scarlett Johansson"). I'm with @Horton: when used for the upswing/transition, one way or another, "pull" is going to leave the wrong impression in a lot of people's minds, just because it's an ambiguous word. In a tug-of-war, "pull" means "a leveraged lean, away, with your body" (that's how coaches and skiers from the pre-ZO era, e.g. Lucky Lowe, used it historically); but standing in front of a slot machine, it means "bend your arm". I don't think it lends itself to the kind of nuanced resistance we're talking about in the transition/upswing (but I like the "downswing"/"upswing" concept).

Yes, "keep line load but not ski load after CL" also made me stop and take note after I read something like that from one of the Adams. I think pull/lean was a necessary concept for all of us when we were in that lower-intermediate free skiing stage, just starting to get cross the wakes aggressively. We come to understand that we need to turn towards the wake and "pull" (or "lean") in the tug-of-war sense, not the slot-machine-lever sense (ie. with leverage, with your body, not by bending your arm). In my mind, by the time you're running the course at 28-30mph, you've come to understand those basics. The things we're talking about in this thread are way beyond more nuanced, of course.

@Wish a couple of things: a) no question that the terms aren't ideal; so in one way I applaud the Adams for digging deeper for meaning, but at the same time, I'm not sure that it's going to be helpful to try to redefine "pull" to mean something completely different than what our whole community understands (as per @adamhcaldwell's comment above) b) agreed, the "staying connected" part isn't all that well understood, and lots of us (me!!) struggle to execute. Ironically(?), I think you misunderstood me, as I'd include the transition as part of staying connected (rolling off the 'away' edge, through flat and onto the inside edge, while still providing some resistance/feeling some load with the upper body). "Staying connected" in my mind is a process through the transition, not a state at the end of the transition. c) I don't think I agree with your definition of pull (line load) vs lean (ski load); that's kinda my point, most skiers — rightly or wrongly — think of them as synonyms. For sure, I'd agree that "lean" has usually been less ambiguous than "pull". But (as per @adamhcaldwell comment above, calling what happens after the CL a kind of "pull") I think we're gonna make more problems than we'd solve if we try to redefine "pull" for the whole community. I think a more helpful way to describe line tension/staying connected after the CL is: there is a skill in "being pulled" after the CL; where "staying connected" can be done well — what the Adams are helping us think about differently — or poorly, e.g. "getting separated".

@AdamCord while we could/should do better with the terms, we have conventionally called one of those things "pull" (or "lean"), and the other we have called "staying connected". You're definitely throwing some helpful light on the latter, but at the same time we had two terms that "everyone" kind of understands. "Pull" ("lean") = trying to accelerate laterally/tangentially, by having load on your feet, leaning away from the pylon, ski on edge away from the boat "Staying connected" = ski neutral or on inside edge, and as you point out, no load on feet; no longer trying to accelerate laterally/tangentially; but maintaining load on body, not "surrendering" body to the inside. Correct? And of course there is the transition between those two states. We could try calling them something else, but that'd be a whole "terminology campaign", and those rarely work out well (e.g. trailing vs leading arm, onside/offside vs heelside/toeside).

Like @Chef23 and @Jmoski I've travelled several times with a soft case, no issues. I put my ski inside my ski bag (with bits of pipe insulation on edges and fin protector) inside this cheap alpine ski bag along with my vest, etc.

I think Chantally Lake is the one just north of Mono Mills, east of Orangeville. I ski at T's pond often. Reasonable prices.

@ConPexEr I think your original question is a great one, and I think the answer is kind of nuanced... at least more nuanced than each company's marketing would want us to believe. I think all the ski companies are constantly trying to improve over "last year's model". But it's arguable that most years, for most models, that means emphasizing a couple of design characteristics while possibly sacrificing some others. When skiers try something new, they very often get a little, temporary performance bump... but more often than not, everything eventually settles back to normal. Every once in a while, one company gets a "hit", a ski that makes a whole bunch of folks ski measurably better — or easier — in a lasting way (of course there's no guarantee that they'll make you ski measurably better). I think those skis are worth paying attention to. Examples might be the last few Radar Vapors, the Nano, some of the early Syndicate models, maybe even the Denali. And then, as @liquid d points out, there's the question of whether your ski "wears out", and how fast, and the answer is probably very dependent on both the ski and the skier.

Right at the apex I try to look straight down the buoy line for a moment. If you tend to rush your turn, this can help immensely.

@AdamCord "I found that when I approach the pull and transition with that goal in mind it completely changes the trajectory I try to take through center" Can you spell that out a little more? What specifically do you change? Do you worry less about angle and more about speed? Do you roll the ski differently?

Like I said near the top, I think there are two key questions for a potential crossover owner, and one of them is whether or not a vDrive layout is a dealbreaker for you. The other is how you prioritize your towed sports. @swc5150 many people's idea of a great day is having a crew of friends and family in the boat, cruising around the lake, swimming, taking kids tubing, wakeboarding or teaching guests how to ski, etc. There's little question that vDrives provide way better seating/layout for that kind of fun on the water. They do come at a cost, however, particularly for slalom skiers, and particularly for slower-speed skiers. Your wife's complaint is usually quite a bit lower on the list, but then again, many wakeboard vDrives now feature easier walkovers to the swim deck (checkout any modern Nautique G series boat). For those who care about slalom, and this forum is for people who do, then you're probably not doing most of your skiing with 7-10 people in the boat. Those who prioritize slalom, have a kid (or crewmember) or two who like to wakeboard will probably do best with a larger DD with a wake system (like Malibu Wedge, Tigé TAPS, etc.). Those who spend a lot of time cruising with a large crew, or who prioritize wakesurfing, will probably do best with one of the more skiable vDrives, emptying the boat and maybe putting a bit of weight in the front for their occasional slalom runs.