1st time surfer. stock avalance

took the avalanche out wake surfing for the 1st time.using a hyperlite board. stock 3 ballasts , starboard side empty. about 150 lbs of lead on the port. and two people on port side.couldn't seem to get the rope slack at all. tried from 8.5 to 11.5 on the pp. Do i need more weight to catch the wave? or maybe im in the wrong position?about how far away from the platform should i be.we were almost right on it to about 10 feet away. will it be obvious and happen or do i have to pump to keep up? im workin on gettin the pics up.

Can you give us a little more information?

Is your board a Land Locked or a Broadcast 4.8/4.9 or the 5.6? How much do you weigh? Do you have a hydraulic wake plate, if so where was it set? Can you take a picture of the wake? How deep is your lake? Did you fill your center tank?

When you find the pocket the line will go slack. When it does don’t get in a hurry to drop the rope. Hang on for a while and work on leaning forward to speed up and leaning back to slow down.

The Avalanche is supposed to be one of the better wakesurf hulls; you should be able to develop a very good surf wake. I have a Centurion Lightning but have never surfed behind an Avalanche. I weigh 220 pounds and started wakesurfing two years ago on a Broadcast 5.6, the green one. It took me several outings to free ride on the Broadcast. Part of the problem was there were no experience wakesuefers to learn from or to tell us if the wake was set up well. Another problem was the widely varying lake depth. I find that I need at lest 13 to 14 feet of depth.

If I’m running slow; maybe 9 mph or slower I set the trim tab down. I used to only do this on the Starboard side but I’ve found it helps on both sides.

After several years of wakesurfing I’ve developed enough skill to ride ridiculously small wakesurf boards, but I also use over 2,000 pounds of ballast. See my other post about surfing small wakes.

I’d start by making sure that your lead is as close the port gunnels as possible. Also fill the center tank.

Good luck.

(Message edited by Bigshow on May 28, 2007)

doen'st make sense at all .. we surf quite bit behind an avy... i'm been able to easly ride w/o the rope w/ literally no weight whatsoever.... just keep trying, you'll get it... put more weight on that front foot too...

my experiance had been it takes most people 3 sets before they feel the flow and can free ride. Thats with other people coaching them on techniques and stuff. As for the wake, for learning a slower bigger wave is better. The slowest you can go and get a clean wave seems to work for my beginners.

im using a hyperlite coax. 4.4. hope thats not to small. It was a gift but whatever. have a stock plate not hydraulic. i weigh about 170 and another rider is about 200. i had the center tank filled along with the port tank.im riding in a river but its about 12'. i did try moving my feet around up and back and actually was so forward i sunk the front of the board and wiped out.and still couldn't get slack. i rode it for 10 minutes on 3 sets up and back on the wake and couldn't cathch it. i have pics i'll work on them in the next couple hours. thanks

Kind of a small board for a 200 pounder. An experienced 170 pound rider should do OK.

Water depth isn't helping you. Can you ride any place that's deeper?

More weight wouldn't hurt.

The coex is a very hard board to learn on. I bought one and quickly purchased the bigger broadcast. Now I ride a Shred Stixx and will never ride a pop out board again! My smaller friends (below 150#) seem to like the coex.

My avy seemed to make a huge wake in anything over 10ft deep. I used a 400# sac on top of the port ballast and a 250# sac under the port seats. All ballast tanks full, trim tab up.

You can always invite some friends out with you to use as ballast. Load the port side up with people and your wake should improve. I'd invest in a sac for the boat v-drive compartment on top of the hard tank, if you plan to surf a lot. The fly high enzo sack fits in the avalanche too, if you want to go all out. You will have to pull the hard tank to fit the enzo sack though

If you have the yellow Mayfair pumps it's incredibly easy to replace the hard tanks with Fly High fat sacks. The Mayfair pumps screw right in to the fat sack inlets. I've replaced the hard tanks in my Lightning with a pair of 750s. I put the end of the sack with two fittings at the back of the boat and the single port end forward. Screw the purge pumps in to the lower rear port. Buy the Fly High ¾ inch fittings to screw in to the fill and vent ports. Plumb the fill to the upper rear and plumb the forward port to the vent. It's that easy.

(Message edited by Bigshow on May 29, 2007)

Ed bigshow, you're the engineer,and sorry if this has been asked before,but what's the theory behind deeper water? The river we ride is average only 9-11 feet deep.(some spots a little more, some even less) is that effecting wake size, or shape? Being from the beach, I always have known waves to break only when they hit shallow water or a reef... Did I miss a physics lesson?

Not sure of the physics behind the depth but our experience is that when it is shallow the wake won't form as big. We have seen the grass growing on the bottom of the man made lake completely washout the wake that just prior was very good. Something about the bouncing off the bottom and reducing the depth that the boat sinks in the water I think.

I’ll start with two empirical examples.

1) We go to Lake James in Indiana every year for a family reunion. Lake James is one of thousands of glacier kettle lakes. The topography of bottom of Lake James has a lot of features and changes very rapidly from well over 60 feet deep to four of five feet. When we surf over one of these features the wake just disappears.

2) I boat On Griggs Reservoir several times a week. Griggs is a 2 mile long narrow body of water. Near the damn Griggs is 19 to 20 feet deep. Near the mid point there’s a slight bend in the river and a wall/bridge. The depth at the wall is 14 feet. North of the wall the depth drops as low as 5 to 6 feet. The change in depth is gradual. With over two years of experience we have learned to surf only up to the wall. Up stream of the wall the wake just isn’t as good.

Now a more theoretical discussion – I’m not a mechanical engineer – Fluid Dynamics is a very challenging subject. My disclaimer I’m an electrical engineer, the following is my engineering intuition.

Water at floor of the ocean moves more slowly than at the surface. The floor of the ocean provides a kind of friction, that’s why movement is slower at the bottom. The middle layers aren’t as fast as the top, but are still faster than the bottom. As surges move forward the bottom can’t keep up with the middle layers and the middle layers can’t keep up with the top. Eventually a mound builds reaches a peak and crashes down when it out runs it’s support. As the top and middle layers rush forward they leave a void behind. The next surge rushes to fill that void. Ocean waves are a long series or chain of events.

Boats create a disturbance where none existed before. There’s one initial wake followed by many subsequent waves. That initial disturbance followed by a chain is different from the ocean case. Suppose the draft of your boat is 3 feet and your lake is 3foot 6 inches deep. Just enough head room for operating your boat. Your boat is going to scoop water away and water is going to rush in to fill in the divot your boat is making in the water. Since there’s only a 6 inch gap between your boat and the bottom of the lake water trying to fill the divot back in is restricted by a 6 inch tall window. The water under the boat rushing in to fill the void is moving fast since it’s under pressure and the flow is restricted. If you had many feet of head room water could rush in from a less restricted window. The water filling in the void would not move as fast as the shallow case. The water at the top of the wake starts out moving as fast as the boat. In the deep water case the water beneath the boat is moving slower. The deep water case is more like the ocean case.

had a hard time resizing pics. so there a little smashed. but see what ya think. are we in the right position? or do i just need more weight. we mainly wakeboard but were still beginners. so i didn't want to go all out with the tanks yet. also i have a walkthrough so i don't know how i would get a bigger bag in the locker. for now we just wanna be able to ride and learn without the rope. and if we go crazy about it. then i'll get more weight. so should i scrap the board for a bigger one?

I'm a little spoiled with my sacked out wake. From what I see I think that your wake would be a difficult wake to surf on any thing but a big board.

The wake in the first picture looks small but OK, the second looks washed out.

Looks like the river's pretty long and wide. Try turning just a little. If your surfing on the port side turn slightly left. That will clean up a washy wake shown in the second picture. If you turn too hard the wake looses its push.

You could spend $400 or more on a bigger board or about the same on some fat sacks. In the long run smaller boards are more fun to ride. Get a boat load of people on board and see if you like the wake with more ballast. Can you get out to some place that's deeper just to see if there's a difference.

Here’s a picture of the wake on my Lightning with 2,000 pounds of ballast. The Avalanche is supposed to be a better surf hull so with a little work you should be able to do better than my wake.