Rope Safety

I read the safety page on the Cyber Shapes web page that Jeff W. posted. One safety precaution advertised is to NOT throw the rope back to the surfer. I have to admit we do this frequently with both seasoned and inexperienced waskesurfers. This July we’ll repeat wakesurfing at the Scioto Wakefest. The course will be straight, narrow, and a little short. To compensate for the short narrow course I was planning on offering two options at the end of the course, 1) a suicide trick or 2) bonus points for successful rope catch for a quick turnabout back the other direction down the course.

Suicide Trick: Last year at the end of each pass of the course we encourage surfers to try a trick that they didn’t think they could pull off or to try a trick like a back flip off of the board, knowing they couldn’t possibly recover. We did not count these falls and down time against the surfers. In my mind this was a way to take a short coming and make it a positive. While this approach encouraged surfers to be creative, the starts and stops did increase the time to run the competition.

Rope Catch: For the 2007 Wakefest I was going offering scoring credit for a successful rope catch/pickup. Once the rider has the rope in hand we’ll be able to make a hard turn and stay in a relatively narrow channel. The advantage of a rope catch is faster conduct of the event. If a rope catch is unsafe then offering scoring points would not be good practice for a public event.

One other consideration, we’re going to have both Malibu and Centurion pulling in the same space at the same time. With two boats running at the same time, tight turns might not be possible. We’ll make up lost time to suicide falls since we’ll have two boats. So maybe I’m answering my own question, just go with the Suicide Trick.

Does this safety precaution rate with CO precautions, I think not. How many people per year die from wakesurf rope catching, how many show up in the emergency ward of your local hospital? Is this really a safety issue?