bsmith

@matthewbrown Regina is a RFF skier. I would have guessed that a RFF skier would take a bit longer to rehab a right knee since skiing puts more stress on the forward leg. Why do you think rehabbing her left knee would take longer?

@Spencer_Shultz You haven't mentioned anything about your spillway design. Typically, small lakes are designed to safely overflow 25% of the possible maximum flood volume for the given water shed situation. Usually, a lake has both a principle and emergency spillway. Small ponds often just use a flat earthen spillway area next to the dam. If your lake is just dug out with no dam required then a simple earthen spillway is likely ok. If your lake involves a dam of some sort and you have significant water shed, then you will likely need a more sophisticated spillway design such as a siphon spillway or elbow pipe spillway. If you have significant overflow, then a good spillway design is needed to get rid of the excess water without incurring major erosion or even dam failure.

@BraceMaker I totally agree that you should teach beginners with a fat ski as slow as is needed for them to make the course. But do you start them at long line or 15 off when doing so? I always start them at long line.

As a beginning course skier, my understanding of becoming free of the boat from everything I have read on BOS previously is that it happens at the end of the swing out before reaching apex and at about the same time I let go of the handle with the outside hand. It is the moment where I feel no pull from the boat such that is easy to let the ski turn inward towards the first wake. This is in contrast to when a beginner first tries the course and they pull long to a buoy and never get any glide time, free of the boat, before trying to make the ski turn back in. In this mode, the beginner feels a significant pull from the boat at all times. The beginner next learns that getting free of the boat is not just about obtaining some unloaded glide time towards the turn buoy, it is learning to get the right combination of speed across the wake with the right amount of deceleration to the buoy such that when the turn is initiated the skier still has enough speed to be free of the boat but not so much speed that the skier turns into a bunch of slack. This understanding of being free of the boat may be wrong, but it is what I think I have learned from BOS over the past year.

@ral I have watched that ebay listing for a number of weeks and could have won it several times before. Since @Horton left the fin business so many years ago, I figured that it likely wasn't considered as good as current production fins so I left it alone. Now that Horton has mentioned the special status of this fin, I am thinking again about it, but it would seem that Horton would want it back in his collection if he doesn't already still have an example from that early best generation of his fin.

@MISkier If I am remembering correctly, that fin keeps getting relisted because no one will even offer the starting bid price. I think a bid of $49 will get that fin.

@Charliesav7 I am a beginner course skier not much further along than you and the offside turn and body position are still my biggest problems. In order to run the course for the first time, I had to spend a lot of time improving those aspects of my skiing. Your onside body position actually looks great to me. You are "stacked", ie. your body is linear and perpendicular to the ski and you have a forward lean in the direction of travel which is very advantageous but also difficult to achieve even for advanced skiers. Since we don't have a full video of you crossing the wake, what I suspect is happening is that you are standing up too soon and not holding your cut through the first wake. As a beginner it is scary to be leaned away from the boat and hold a load through that first wake and pass through the center line of the boat path with a lot of speed. You need to practice hitting the wakes at speed from both sides and get comfortable doing that. The onside turn is very forgiving of not carrying speed through the wakes and thus you are still able to make a good turn and set a good cross angle. But the off side turn requires you to carry enough speed into it that you become "free of the boat" and wide enough on the boat that you get a feeling of no pull from the rope. It is during that freedom from the boat that you force the ski to turn starting from your feet up. You should have as much weight as you can on your front foot and your upper body should lag behind your lower body on rotation. Let this rotation phase take some time so that the ski can achieve the cross course angle you want before the load hits. For a beginner, making the ski turn on the off side does not come naturally. For me, I could not just rely on the ski carving on its own. I felt like I had to provide a lot of physical input to help the ski turn. On final tip on carrying speed into the off side turn, make that speed early with a hard cut into the first wake. If you keep cutting hard past the second wake, you will definitely make speed into the turn, but you will also turn into a ton of slack.

For quite some time now, someone in Leander, Texas has been trying to sell on ebay a carbon fiber fin that appears to be signed by J. T. Horton. The seller only wants $49 for it. Seems like a good deal to me. Just wondering if @Horton can confirm that this fin is genuine and that the signature is in fact his. The ebay link is this https://www.ebay.com/itm/Carbon-Fiber-Water-Ski-Fin-/264959121697 Since that link will die in 6 days (although it has been relisted about 6 times now), I have provided a screen shot of the ebay listing as well.

@unksskis and @Hallpass I actually already own a 43.5" graviton trick ski and have learned all the basic surface turns and am now trying to do wake turns. But as you guys say, it's hard and I took a lot of falls to learn S's, F's, B's, and O's. I am thinking that I could learn more tricks faster on a bigger ski or wakeboard and then pretty easily carry those skills back to a real trick ski if and when speed becomes important as @unksskis mentions. And while all kinds of wakeboards can be picked up for a dime a dozen, I did want to avoid the problem @Bruce_Butterfield encountered where he tried an arbitrary wake board as a trick ski and discovered that it caught edges easily when sideways. According to you guys maybe that is not really a problem for most boards so I will try to find a relatively flat wakeboard and make my own experiment on whether I can progress faster or not with it.

One of the other comments in the thread on trick skis for big guys is that instead of the 54" length of the large size Goode trick ski, that something closer to 50" might be better. To that point, I found this brand new World Industties 48" kids wakeboard here https://www.amazon.com/World-Industries-Battle-Wakeboard-124cm/dp/B00GNA0SCG for just $59. On another sales site for this board I saw that it is a continuous rocker board for wake boarders up to 130 pounds. Would this board be ok as a trick ski for a 195 pound skier?

Wouldn't any model for handle path have to also account for the possibility of small amounts of slack line as the skier rounds a buoy? Or at 41 off, is there never any slack to the handle on a pass that is run complete?

@jgills88 You mention that for a beginner using a wakeboard makes a lot of basic tricks easier to do than using a standard sized trick ski. I have been wondering about whether to try that myself for awhile. But in this thread https://www.ballofspray.com/forum#/discussion/24201/big-guy-trick-ski @Bruce_Butterfield explains how a lot of wakeboards have a continuous rocker which makes them prone to catching an edge when in a sideways position. Since you and many of your friends in college used wakeboards for tricks, did you guys ever have a favorite brand or model of wakeboard for use as a trick ski?

Good one! @ScottScott But the main thing I take from this is that no matter how far I might ever go on my own, my offside turn is still likely to be my main weakness.

What I would do and what I suspect many here would do as well is not listed in the choices available. I would hang on and just merely try to right myself and not fall. This means that I would give up all cross course angle and just ski straight down the middle, assuming that I managed not to fall.

I second what @thager said, Scrappiest pass I have ever seen! Unreal!!!!!! It was interesting to see that her troubles were all on her offside turn, just like many of us mere mortals experience. The way she was able to reset her angle on ball 3 after a near fall was amazing. If such a recovery can be done at 39' off, it makes me wonder whether I should try harder to regain angle when I falter at much longer line lengths.