We have had fun all year dialing and experimenting with the Z3, it has been a great platform to play with. It has responded very well to all the things we have done and it has been very rewarding to feedback our work to the factory for the benefit of others. In the back of my mind, and as I have stated several times throughout the year, I have always planned to "slam" the boat at least once to see what it would do. I mean, when you dial in a boat you want to know what setup makes the best wake. There are usually several setups that make a great wake on a good boat, and you make trade offs with each. For instance you may have a setup when you have just a few people out, and another when you load it up with people. One setup for calm mid week surfs, and another for rough days. We did this on our other boats because sometimes the funnest wake was when the boat was loaded down to a point that you didn't feel comfortable if it was rough out. Well, we haven't really done that with the Z3. It has seemed no matter how much weight you put in it, it just didn't care. The rub rail never comes close to the water and with the pointed bow and hull its the driest boat we have had.
That said, we went out on a weekday in late October with some extra sacks and the chase boat. I invited several of my friends and we had a blast. We figured 5k of water should get that rub rail down. That is 4k completely hidden, and one 1100 lb sac in the middle of the boat.
Please note that this is just an experiment. We did this once, and probably won't do it again. The boat felt safe at all times and the lake was empty for us to do this test.
IMG_9922 by
wake9, on Flickr
We had fun all day with that sac in the middle of the boat. Don't even get me started about antics that happened when RJ or Dave would slap the sac and make us all giggle like school boys, even Janelle. Lets just say, it had a familiar sound to it. You can see this is something we don't want to do normally, but had to try it once.
So how was the wake, and did we get the rub rail down?
IMG_9940 by
wake9, on Flickr
IMG_6410 by
wake9, on Flickr
IMG_6890 by
wake9, on Flickr
The best way I can describe the wake is "extra meaty". You could tell the boat was pushing a mass amount of water. The rollers were huge and it looked like you could surf the secondary wake that follows the boat on its own. It wasn't better though. There was so much water that when riders got to the back of the wake the curl could grab you and take you down. The pocket also felt a bit shorter. Our previous weight setup and with the Convex VX you get a really nice long wake with a small, flat curl that makes for a great long pocket with lots of push and a transition that even makes Janelle happy. So we decided to empty Sacagawea (our nickname for the ginormous sac that shared the interior of our boat) and get back to that wake we love. You can also see in the pictures, we still were NO WHERE near the rub rail. I have no idea how much weight it would take to get that rub rail down, but its more than I am willing to try and we determined that there is a point where it doesn't make it better anyway.
We had a bit of a "boys will be boys" moment here.
IMG_6960 by
wake9, on Flickr
The Convex VX likes a bit more weight than we rode before we had it on the Z3. With it we setup 350 more lbs on the surf side, fill up the entire front of the pro ballast system and then set list to about 8 or 9 degrees. Our setup without the Convex VX was a custom PnP sac (1250 lbs) in the rear surf corner on top of the 250 lbs hard tank. Fill up the front and weight the other side and people to get the 8 or 9 degrees of list. With the Convex VX we just add a 400 lbs V-Drive sac into the side seat storage just in front of the end of the custom PnP sac. We only get 300-350 lbs in this sac, and then weight the rest of the boat to 8 or 9 degrees.
For those that haven't followed our previous posts, the Z3 only requires 8 or 9 degrees of list for the best wake. This means you almost weight the boat flat and the boat doesn't lean much at all. The Z3 also has a ton of freeboard, like 5 inches more than the 24Ve had so it doesn't seem to be concerned.
So we spent the rest of the afternoon having a blast, it was perfect conditions and the sun was out. I think we all were glad we tried to slam the boat, but it was also very rewarding to know that our dialed in setup was the better wake. The slammed setup was too much weight and too uncomfortable, and if it was much better we would have been tempted to do it more and probably end up getting a hit put out on us by some group of fisherman.
Threaded Mode