Tow boat manufacturers, naturally, have answered the call.……” ….Alpine Haus Marina has the largest marine service center in Spokane County and have just been awarded the “Best Marine Business in Spokane Valley” for 3 consecutive years.2020/2021/2022….We pride ourselves in 36 years of servicing all makes and models of inboard and sterndrive boats…Alpine Haus has been Spokane’s premier water sports dealer since 1976. Essentially a wakeboard without bindings, wake skating itself evolved into wakesurfing, which calls for even bigger wakes. From wakeboarding, the sport of wake skating evolved. Those ski poles became towers, with racks to hold boards, speakers, and even video cameras. Ski pylons became ski poles that stretched as high as six feet above the deck and were supported with cables to the bow eye. Huge ballast tanks filled with water to add weight and bigger wakes, and gobs of seating to bring more friends - which adds even more weight. You can probably guess what happened next. The power path forms the shape of a V, thus the name V drive. The engine delivered power to the transmission, which directed power back underneath the engine to the propeller, which is located in the same place you’d find it on a direct drive. By moving the engine to the stern and mounting it backward - flywheel facing the bow - they accomplished two goals: they created more room inside the boat, and the rearward weight bias created bigger wakes. These large wakes created launch ramps for all the tricks wakeboarders are famous for. ![]() Unlike skiing, wakeboarding was better with a big wake behind the boat. When wakeboarding began to take off as a sport, tow boat manufacturers were in the catbird’s seat. But that changed with the advent of wakeboarding, a sport many credit with reinventing the tow boat industry-and in all candor, it did. Ski boats are more plush today, but competition ski boats are still designed primarily to create flat wakes, not to carry a lot of people, which is one reason why tournament inboards never sold in huge numbers, particularly as family boats. Besides, the ski rope connected to the tow pylon in front of the engine “doghouse,” so no one could sit in the rear of the boat while someone was skiing anyway. So, they were often closed bow models, with a driver seat and an observer seat large enough for two-but that was about it. As skiers became more competitive and discerning, they learned that adding more people added weight, which made the wakes bigger and more difficult to manage. Introduced in 2009, Nautique’s Ski Nautique 200 closed-bow model is the pinnacle of what a dedicated tournament ski boat can be, but it’s still best suited to two or three people. The engine was mounted amidships, with a one-speed transmission behind it followed by a driveshaft to the propeller, thus the term direct drive. The boats were initially sparse by design, because they weren’t intended to accommodate more than three or four people. Tow boat builders began experimenting with bottom designs to try to create the flattest wakes possible, so competition skiers could cross them quickly and easily as they scamper around the buoys of a tournament slalom course. Once the manufacturers had the powertrain figured out, the escalation of the sport began. The V-8 inboard powertrain delivered just that. The need to pull a skier - or skiers - from a deep-water start required significant low-end torque. ![]() The origin of all tow boats traces back to water skiing. Whereas a runabout uses an outboard or a stern drive, watersports boats, or “tow boats” as they’re commonly called, use an inboard engine in either a direct-drive or V-drive configuration. Watersports boats are a bit different from runabouts, particularly in their powertrains. Dedicated watersports boats often fill very specific niches, and when wakeboarding took the industry by storm, MasterCraft capitalized in a big way with its X Star line of tow boats.
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