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So I’ve been noticing a lot of wake threads lately, ranging from pics, discussions, to how to threads. So I wanted to start a thread really dissecting what we’re doing with wakes and weighting. This may receive some bashing but I don’t care. Going against the grain here but has anyone stopped and thought that maybe we are over weighting boats? This isn’t a safety or legal discussion it’s to stop and think about is the 4000 pounds of extra ballast we’re adding really making the better wake. Is adding that 1000 pounds of lead to the nose really helping?
I ride behind pretty much the smallest boat in the towboat world. The Malibu Sportster LX. Direct drive open bow, but she’s small really meant for skiing. However, with a wedge and a 600 sack and a few friends it doesn’t do too badly. We started with just the wedge, and then added the 600 sack (who knows how much it really weighs) then recently we add a couple hundred pounds to the nose. We rode like that for about a week when we noticed the wake actually got smaller. Adding the 600 pounds to the rear sunk the rear end of the boat but adding the 200+ to the bow brought it back up. Took the weight out of the bow and now we’re back to our preferred wake. So that got me thinking, if that worked for me, it may work for some of you using 6000 pounds of ballast.
This is not a thread to get help “dialing” in my own wake. In fact, I’m not so sure of that term. I read all the time about how someone added 2k to the stern 1k to the bow but that made the wake mushy, so they had to add 1k to the walk way, which shortened up the transition so they had to put 5 hundo under each seat. So now they’re 5k overtop of the factory ballast and the boat handles like hell, needs a prop change and if we do a comparison against the same boat with maybe only 1000-2000 lbs it’s not a tremendous difference.
Maybe all of the arguments about some of the newest boats not being as good at producing wakes is because we’re sticking to our old school mentality of weighting while using the latest developments from our favorite boat companies. Maybe once we’ve added so much weight we’re negating some of the latest designs put into the hull that were there to help produce great wakes. I’ve read about people on this board who have never ridden their boat with just the factory ballast, the moment they got the boat they added a couple hundred pounds.
So I propose this. Any of you who are “dialing in” your wake with an extra couple tons of weight, strip it clean and start from scratch. Who cares about pictures, ride it, see what it’s like with only the factory ballast, who knows you may be impressed. I know all of us don’t have factory ballast (myself included) so start with your 1 bag or whatever, just start small and make small changes. Some of these boats we’re ridding just might have phenomenal wakes, but ironically enough we’re hiding it under too much weight.
I may be off of my rocker here but at the very least it’ll save you a little gas money.
b
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