Friday, January 8, 2010

Soooo.. The free advice morsel for the day is this, if you tow surf or are considering tow surfing do not suck your tow rope in to the impeller of your jet ski! Seems like a really simple concept right? It is so easy to not realize that the rope has slacked and drifted under the ski, set comes rolling in and you hit the start button and BRRRAPP clunk, the fat, gazillion pound test tow rope that you dropped a couple of large bills on is wrapped around the impeller shaft like a pair of panty hose around the beater bar on your Kirby and you are sitting in the middle of a very energized ocean on an 800 pound log. Just helped a couple of our buddies retrieve their ski off a remote beach after this happened to them and they fortunately had a second ski to tow them to the beach.

We had this happen to us on a day the Reef was firing off 3o' waves and the beach break was in the 15'face range. We ended up towing our ski through the beach break after a failed attempt to clear the impeller by spending a half hour or so in the channel between north and south reef with one of us holding the ski rolled on its side while the other guy sawed on the rope with a steak knife. One of the odd situations I have found myself in over the last few years that I will no doubt never forget.

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