winter wakesurfing in the south, water temp, wetsuit vs drysuit and what the boat hates in the cold

Chelan is deep and cold and i surf into november most years, so i will co sign the wear for the swim part hard. i fell once in october in just a 3/2 and the cold shock gasp is real, you suck in a breath you cannot control and if your face is in the water at that second it is a problem. that is the actual danger, not hypothermia twenty minutes later, it is the first ten seconds.

so my rule is first fall of the day i get in on purpose off the swim step before we surf, so the gasp happens when i am holding the platform and not when i am a hundred feet back with a board on my foot. sounds dumb, works.

good thread and the swim step trick is one i do too. the part i want to add is what cold does to the boat, since people read a winter surf thread and forget the boat has opinions about 45 degree mornings.

if you surf cold and then trailer home and park it in the cold, you have a wet boat full of ballast water sitting below freezing overnight in some of these places, even in the south when a front comes through. drain the ballast completely after a cold session. a half inch of water left in a tank or a hard line can freeze and split a fitting, and you find out in the spring when it will not hold water. same with the raw water side, which is a rigging board topic, but the short version is a boat that gets used cold and parked cold needs to be fully drained, not just shut off.

the other one is the engine never really comes up to temp on a short cold session, so you get more condensation in the oil. if you surf a couple cold mornings a month all winter, change the oil before spring anyway, do not go by hours.

central Texas surfs most of the winter too, our lakes sit low 50s in january. i will add the gear that made cold surfing actually fun instead of a dare: a changing robe and a thermos of something hot in the boat. you are fine while you ride, it is the standing around wet between sets that ends the day. a cheap neoprene hood under a beanie keeps way more heat in than people expect because your head dumps it fast.

and booties with a real sole, not the thin dive ones, because the ramp and the swim step are ice cold and slick in the winter and a cold numb foot on a wet platform is how people go down hard.

reading this from a frozen state with my boat shrink wrapped, a little jealous. the one thing i will warn about for the snowbirds who haul a northern boat south for the winter: if your boat was winterized with antifreeze in the block for the drive down, you have to pull that out and run it before you surf, and then you are surfing a boat that has to be re winterized or fully drained again before you tow it back north in february.

i know two guys who towed home in february with a plain water system because they forgot the boat was effectively de winterized by a month of use, and both of them split something. if you are snowbirding the boat, keep track of which state the cooling system is in, water or antifreeze, because it is easy to lose the plot over a long winter.