2019 Malibu Wakesetter 23 LSV, Monsoon 450, bought blind out of a Tennessee lender yard

good writeup and welcome. the wave is fixable and it is almost never the boat on a 23 LSV, so breathe. before anybody can help you though we need what you actually did, not what you meant to do. a washy wave that dies fifteen feet back is the classic underweight-and-too-fast wave, and it is also the classic weight-too-far-forward wave, and those are opposite fixes, so guessing makes it worse.

answer these and the thread can get to work. how full were the three tanks, the two rear and the center, and did you fill them all or just hit the Max Ballast button and assume. where was the Power Wedge set. what speed did the gauge read when you were surfing, not when you were plowing out of the hole. and which side were you trying to surf, goofy or regular, and which Surf Gate was deployed when you did. write those down from memory now while it is fresh.

one more. 312 hours on a 2019 means somebody surfed it hard for a few seasons and then stopped paying for it. i would want to know the impeller and the V-drive fluid were done at your commissioning before you ran it much, which is a rigging board conversation, but it matters here too because a boat that is not pulling a full load of water into the tanks will never build the wave you are chasing.

i will second everything reed said and add the one thing that fixed my boat when i was exactly where you are. front to rear balance. a 23 LSV wave that is mushy on top and short is usually too bow light, which sounds backwards. you want the stern down and dug in, but you also need enough weight midship and forward that the hull sits at the right running angle, or the back half of the boat just squats and shoves water instead of peeling it off clean.

so when you answer reed, tell us whether anybody was sitting up front. four adults in the bow changes that wave more than a lot of people believe. my SA350 went from a wall i could not get past to a push i could ride one handed when i moved two people from the stern bench to the bow and dropped half a mile an hour.

and the speed. everybody runs too fast at first because the slow wave feels wrong under the boat. a 23 LSV surf wave lives somewhere around 10.8 to 11.6 depending on how you load it, and the difference between 11.2 and 12.0 is the difference between a wave and a bump. what does your PerfectPass or your Malibu Command read when you are actually in it.

the Surf Gate part trips up every new Malibu owner, so let me take that piece. the gate that deploys is on the opposite side from the wave you surf. you want the clean wave on the port side so the rider is on your left, the starboard gate drops and kicks the water over to build the port wave. if your rider keeps ending up on the mushy side, there is a real chance you are deploying the wrong gate or the Command system is set to the stance you are not riding.

regular foot, left foot forward, most people surf the wave that puts their heel to the boat, and that is usually the port side on a Malibu set to regular. goofy is the mirror of it. the boat will happily make a bad wave on the correct side if the ballast is wrong, which is why reed and ballast_balance are asking about weight first and i am only talking about the gate. get the weight right, then the gate just picks which side.

when you go out next, run it with the stock surf profile first before you start overriding tabs and wedge by hand. the 2019 Command surf setting is actually a decent starting point and new owners tend to fight it on day one. i did.

there it is. that impeller is the whole post as far as i am concerned, and i winterize fifty of these a fall, so hear me out for the people reading this in three years with a washy wave. you cannot tune a surf wave on a boat that is only pulling two thirds of a ballast tank. you will chase it forever, add lead, go slower, go faster, and never get there, because the boat physically does not have the water in it to make the wave. find the water problem first.

the slow prime on the center tank is worth running down before you blame the pump. on the 2019 plumbing it is usually a check valve or an air leak at a hose clamp on the suction side, not the pump itself, and it is a cheap afternoon. the pump works harder, primes slower, and quits years early if you leave it. if it still primes slow after you chase the clamps, then look at the pump.

and for the record, a 19 dollar impeller and a slow ballast pump on a boat that sat at a lender yard is exactly the kind of thing you accept when you buy one this way. nobody misrepresented anything. the conaway listing said 312 hours and showed the impeller housing, it did not promise the impeller was fresh, and a repo comes with whatever the last owner left in it. you found it in your own driveway for 19 dollars instead of at 30 miles an hour with a cooked engine. that is a win, not a gripe.

now that the tank actually fills, here is the lead and the order i would do it, one change at a time so you can feel what each one does.

start stock. full tanks, Power Wedge where the surf profile puts it, 11.2 on the gauge, correct gate for your side, nobody up front yet. ride it. my bet is it is already most of the way there just from the tank filling.

then add one 250 pound lead bag in the rear corner on the surf side, down in the footwell behind the rear seat, not up on the seat. that is the single biggest wave move there is on these boats and it is why people with hard tanks still throw a sack in the back. ride it again.

then move one adult from the stern to the bow. this is the one nobody wants to do because it feels like you are robbing the wave, and it is the one that cleans up the top of a mushy wave and makes it push instead of crumble. if the wave gets too short after that, you went a touch too far forward, move them back to the middle. you are hunting for the running angle where the hull releases the water clean.

write the setting on your phone every single time, the speed, the wedge number, the lead, and who sat where. in four trips you will have your own recipe and you will stop guessing. and do not touch two things at once or you learn nothing.

on the speed, since that is my hill to die on. the 2019 Command on your boat is holding speed off GPS, and a tenth of a mile an hour is a real amount in a surf wave. the thing people miss is that GPS speed and the speed the water feels are not the same when there is any wind or current, and on a river lake like Fort Loudoun there is current.

run your passes both directions. the wave that is perfect at 11.2 going downriver can need 11.4 going back up because the water is moving under you. do not just set a number and trust it, watch the actual wave and let the rider tell you. a good surfer ten feet back with no rope will feel a tenth before the gauge shows it to you.

and keep it in surf mode, not cruise. the surf setting ramps the throttle softer so the wave does not surge every time the boat corrects its speed. a lot of new owners surf in the wrong profile and blame the wave for pulsing when it is the speed control stabbing at the throttle.

wakesetter_23_new wroteit is still a touch short compared to my buddy's boat and i think i am a little too fast and a little too bow heavy now

you are reading your own wave now, which is the whole game. short usually means too fast more than it means ballast, so before you move anybody back, try dropping to 11.0 and see if the wave lengthens. on my 25 the difference between 11.0 and 11.3 is about three feet of usable push.

if 11.0 does not do it, then bring your wife halfway back from the bow, not all the way. you want her weight doing something, just not shoving the nose down so hard the wave goes vertical and short. and make sure you are surfing the correct side for her stance, not yours. a lot of couples fight the wave because one is regular and one is goofy and they keep swapping gates without re-setting anything else.

jumping in only on the impeller part because it is the thing i preach about. you did it the right way, you pulled the cover and looked before you ran it, instead of after. on a boat that sat, the raw water impeller is the cheapest insurance there is and it is the thing that cooks an engine when a vane lets go and jams the cooling.

one thing to add for whoever reads this later. when you pull an old impeller, count the vanes and the pieces. if a vane is missing a chunk, that chunk is downstream in your heat exchanger or your exhaust elbow and it will come back to haunt you. yours had a crack starting but was whole, so you are fine, but go look anyway. and keep that spare impeller and a cover gasket in the boat. twenty minutes on the ramp beats a tow.

two housekeeping things while this is the busiest thread on the board.

a few folks have emailed the mailbox wanting this fellow's phone number to quiz him about buying a boat the way he did. member contact details stay private here, as the contact page spells out, so put your question in the thread. he replies.

and the thing worth saying out loud for anybody about to do what he did. buying an inboard you have never run, from a lender yard four states away, is not the risk people think it is if you commission it like you would any used boat the day it lands, and he did. the paperwork part of the conaway's deal was the easy part, clean title after the lien release, notarized, in the tube. the hard part was always going to be an old impeller and a surf wave he had to learn, and both of those are on him and the previous owner, not the broker. one honest note on that, since he mentioned the slow prop email: financing was not on the table, the titles carry the lender's lien until the thing is paid in full, so he wired cash. anybody doing this brings the money or lines up their own credit union loan first.