lazzn

Here's a better point: a skier learning the course probably expends wayyyyyyy more energy than an experienced skier doing a 6 pass set, especially if they are not pushing the limits and working on form instead.

Is that the main plate with the HO hole pattern?

I have a 41 tail handle and it's been great. The rubber feels a bit different from masterline, but the grippy-ness has gotten better with age. After 3 seasons of use as my primary slalom and occasional jump handle, I've worn the rope down quite a bit, but no worse than I would've expected from any other brand. I will likely be replacing it with a new syndicate handle this year. That being said, I've always liked every masterline handle I've ever used as well. The syndicate wins the price battle, and that is important to a collegiate skier like me.

To echo what Jody mentioned, some of the older higher end skiers I pull (on their boats of course) will usually have a pretty significant RPM add bump that they've played with to get the feeling they want. Something to feel out, but if PP is running (slightly) hot times in practice the ZO will probably not feel like as much of a kick as some people describe. I myself at slower speeds really only notice the difference between courses with magnets and without magnets in classic PP. Otherwise it's much harder to tell

How about something more broad, a stat connecting like the skier's average tournament placement podium wise to their average tournament score in buoys. Or maybe other things too like their consistency in runoffs. Or even adding in a connection to how the skiers score compares to others in the tournament, so its a factor of the competition level, how they actually skied numbers wise, and whether they had pressure put on them to ski well

At the enormous risk of a panda/making a fool of myself on the internet: Was there not a pending world record set at this tournament? That means (at least a little bit of) it must be reviewed(not to mention all of the homologation). Why are we bothering to do the sport of tournament skiing if people cannot ski well without it suddenly being "something was intentionally wrong". What's the point of having R events anymore. Should we just start classifying tournaments by how close to perfect their homologation dossier is? Why don't we just have one site where all of the tournaments happen, it can be nobody's home site and it can be remeasured after every skier. It can use super high res EC cameras and Surepath, and we can throw out scores with out of tolerance paths before they're even posted. Will that finally be enough? Is the problem here simply that the process isn't fast enough and scores that did occur with unfair conditions get posted and then pulled when they have been reviewed later? Without real actual information about the tournaments themselves this kind of argument is nothing but harmful. As an aspiring TC (and driver) that spends a little too much time looking at the rule books, it seems to me that the tolerances for everything are fine. Pushing them is not worth it because at some point it will go wrong. The process for these tournaments should catch anything that's wrong. To suggest that we are letting things through this many times is to suggest an impossibly large scale of collusion, or that a lot of senior officials are incompetent. As for the rankings list, am I the only one looking at it who finds that (looking on the surface without doing statistics) a vast majority of the scores from that tournament which affected the list are not that much different than other scores? Sure some were fairly above average, but what's to say that there isn't some other qualitative bias at play here for many of the lower ranking scores that were above average. As I recall earlier in the summer, many skiers who normally had high averages in other seasons had a low dynamic ranking list average because they simply had not been to many tournaments. Many of them were still training like normal though, and when they did find themselves at an R event they beat their scores by a great margin. Is this to be considered an anomaly? Especially in a year where many skiers season was drastically different than normal, it is important to consider what else could cause this.

As a good wisconsinite I can say that while Summer Shandy may not improve my score, it will help me get over my bad scores

The time has come for me to get new liners and as a broke college student I want to save money without compromising good feeling. I'm in FM Quattro boots that fit a little big on me, so I'm currently leaning towards an Intuition universal liner, but I can get a pair of the HO Syndicate boot liners for a much lower price. Can anyone speak to how thick they are vs the intuition aqua and universal liners?

15 off and still speeding up skier here. Was on double boots for 3 years and after watching a lot of video I decided that all of the extra ankle support in the back was kind of encouraging me to get on my back foot when things got tough. Switched to an R style and while my buoy count is effectively the same, my skiing is so much cleaner (both from my point of view and those I ski with) and more consistent. Was a weird switch the first two sets but honestly it went really smooth.

One of my roommate's quarantine project was this Trick Points Calculator and we've been putting it to use lately, might be a different kind of useful. Its nice to pull up on the boat when you don't want to think of points for a single run

The better question I think is does this help boost state tournament attendances? I feel like this may be the more important effect

Can't comment on the full suit version, but the new HO heater top in the current Wisconsin high 50's air low 50's water has been really good. Making me really think about getting a full suit.

The dream for myself as an aspiring driver is a split frame with time synced video like the first video Horton posted and end course so I can see exactly what I was doing and what it came out as on the water. My 2 cents

The pro tour stopped in Madison, WI a couple times back in the 80s. Monona bay is protected from all directions of wind except one, and it has a park across the shore so it's a great spectator spot. (its also not used by wake/surf boats) There is no longer a course in the bay (theres one outside the bay though) but i'm told the anchors from the pro tour are still there. I would imagine getting permits from the city would be the biggest hurdle to hosting an event there.

I feel like this can go one of two ways in the short run. Either AWSA drops regulations for tournament boats so that more personal boats are eligible, or something changes with promo boats. On the regulations side, my feeling has always been that the main purpose of ZO is as a homologation tool. If your boat was AWSA certified WITH ZO as the speed control, and your boat can have the latest ZO version, hypothetically it should be able to pull any tournament. (I am sure i will catch flak for that statement but something has to give eventually.) Obviously the biggest problem with this is that regions with less promo boats will have more older boats pulling tournaments, while places like (florida) are more likely to have all new boats. On the promo program side of things, how have the number of promo boats tracked the demand for ski boats in general over the years? Is the lack of promo boats a problem with program design or is it a symptom of what's happening to the market in general? In my mind, everything in this sport is very related. As a collegiate skier, a lot of the kids I ski with plan to buy ski boats after college. Certainly not new, but you could bet that many of them will be able to afford a new one ~relatively~ soon after graduating. But how many of those kids will stay involved enough in the tournament scene to have incentives to buy a new boat. We all love/want the new boats, but in reality, if a skier isn't skiing in lots of tournaments/competing to be on top, there are significantly diminishing returns to getting a new boat. Less people skiing -> less people wanting new boats all the time -> factories having less money to support promo programs -> less people skiing behind the newest boats -> continue cycle. SO i guess my point is, is the promo program where the change has to break? Or is it a problem that is more easily solved by fixing the rest. In general, skiers want the latest and greatest. If lowering requirements for tournament boats helps more tournaments happen, and more tournaments helps increase involvement, then eventually there will be more demand for new boats. More skiers in general give a better chance of more people wanting to do promo. More demand for boats gives more money for factories/dealers to support promo programs. Idk, just my crappy take on things.

@Dacon62 i've seen posts of a sort of ~tournament~ format where skiers ski through what look like slightly wider than normal gates and then they have to ski wide enough to bend the wand on each side 6 times and then out another gates. It's an interesting concept for sure

@6balls I'm with the UW team but on a peak summer afternoon of slaloming on the Monona course there's bound to be several boats in rotation. Its not an every day kinda thing but if the conditions line up and there aren't too many surfers by the course the slalomers come out to play

Ok maybe this is a bad idea but being a skier from a northern state I tend to get thinking during winter. If the really advanced steering controllers used in high end driving simulations can be programmed to give steering wheel feedback, what stops us from making a slalom driving simulator. There’s obviously no replacement for the real thing, but it’s an interesting thought experiment to explore. Programming the steering feel of different boats steering feel shouldn’t be too hard and you could even maybe add something for rudder adjustments too. There’s one snag that I see and that’s how to have a computer simulate how the skier will respond if you are driving in sync with them or driving a poor path. If winter is only half over and my ideas are already getting this wack well, winter needs to get over sooner.

Next step: composite honeycomb core.

The biggest red flag (for me at least) is wood stringers on the calabria. I have no experience with this boat, but even if the wood stringers are good now, if they do rot it will be a headache for sure. What do you want the open bow for? The playpen bows end up being more useful for keeping equipment in than anything... Both the sporty and the prostar are excellent choices. Your determining factor may be whichever one was better cared for mechanically

@Stevie Boy for what it's worth my omni fits in the perfski/radar bag, but not my older overton's traditional ski bag

I also have the black and white graviton. First trick ski I've owned and it's also the ski that I stopped hating and started enjoying trick on. I'm very much not a good tricker but learning body position and tricks on this ski has been a breeze compared to everything else I had been on before

For what it's worth the sky is the limit for the cost of both sports. I know people who spend over 10 grand per year on golf (and its associated expenses) and people who spend an insignificant amount. Likewise I know people who always have new ski boats and people who are happy to rip behind their fishing boats. At the end of the day it comes down to what you want out of the sport. Having some recreational fun in either sport is very different from trying to put together a successful competition career and that is always going to be the case. While money is an issue, the bigger issue is just getting exposure. Collegiate skiing is great for this. I've watched a lot of people (myself included) go from recreational to having the 3 event bug in a big way. From what I've heard the grassroots events are also great at this. But it requires sponsors and people that want to put in the time and money to do them. I am certain there are plenty of people out there who would grow into big participants in the competition side of the sport, but haven't been exposed to it in a way that would draw them in. If you can figure out how to advertise/sell the tournament lifestyle to a lot of people, some of them just might buy.

I've never been let down by a masterline, but last season I got one of the HO syndicate handles and it was awesome! I got the .940 diameter because I am a finger gripper and that really works for me. But it very much is a personal preference thing. Highly recommend trying out some different sizes if you can

The fact that you can see it in certain versions of the webcast but not others suggests that what is actually being seen is a frame interpolation that contains information from both the frame before where the ball in front of the ski, then when it is behind it. This could be due to the stream stepping down frame rates to cope with crappy internet. Any grade of camera's video can suffer from this too. The proof would really come from a camera that was on site and has preserved its original frame rate