PinnedStart here: the three boards and the house rules

welcome aboard. this place is for inboard tow boats and nothing else, V-drive and direct drive, so Malibu and Axis, Mastercraft, Nautique, Supra and Moomba, Tige and Centurion, plus the old three event ski boats. outboards and sterndrive legs have plenty of homes elsewhere, and i will happily point you to one rather than argue about it here.

there are three places to post. Ski & wake talk covers riding: wave shape, rope and board questions, how fast to go, props, lake life, the vibration at 400 hours. Ballast, towers & winterizing is for the hardware and the cold months, meaning tanks and bags, the plumbing and pumps that feed them, towers and racks, and everything layup. Buying and auctions is the place for dollars and deals: what a boat ran, which yard it rolled out of, repos, and whatever caught people off guard at the ramp.

i ran a ski school boat on the lake out here for the better part of two decades, and these days i spend my winters wrenching on inboards at a local marina. that means i field the same handful of questions every single May. my wave is soft, how much water should actually be in the tanks, and did the last owner bother to fog it. not one of those needs to be a mystery, and none of them gets a straight answer on the mixed boat sites buried under pontoon threads.

the rules fit on one hand. put the make, the model year, the engine and the surf system in your opening line. a surf question with no weight and no speed in it cannot be answered, so include both. do not try to sell anything in a thread, we left classifieds off this site deliberately. if your paycheck comes from a marina, a boat dealer, a lending bank or an auction outfit, flag it where it comes up. past that, treat each other like adults, because the brand loyalists all share the same three boards whether they like it or not.

signups run through email at the moment, while the bots are still thick. drop a line with what you run and the lake it sits on, and a login will find its way back to you. the full writeup lives on the about page. reed.

both reasonable. the year in the title went into the about page rules just now, and when somebody forgets i will do what the rest of you do and reply asking. towers and racks belong on the rigging board next to the plumbing, since it is all hardware, and i am not spinning up a fourth board for a hobby that really only has three subjects.

the signup log shows 56 new accounts since Tuesday, and my own guess for the whole first month was something like a dozen, so a link out there is doing work. a couple of those 56 build towers for a living and one of them winterizes boats at a Minnesota marina, so for a site that is three days old the help in here is already punching way above its weight.

fair warning that these next two months are all layup and boat show season, which means the rigging board fills with winterizing questions and the buy board fills with people chasing off season deals. if you are staring down thirty or fifty grand on a used inboard, go read what the folks on the buy board actually paid and what bit them before you wire a dime. a lot cheaper than learning it in your own driveway come May.