2013 Wakesetter 23 LSV Pics w/ Surfgate

[CVand2010VLX]

Great looking boats! Next time i'm in the area I'll have to check them out.

Cody

Edited August 27, 2012 by CVand2010VLX

[bobbymc77]

What is the purpose of the surfgate?

[Tyger]

What is the purpose of the surfgate?

The purpose of the surf gate is to be able to switch between wakeboarding, wakesurfing right and wakesurfing left in a few seconds. It does this by allowing you to weight the boat evenly and still get a good surf wake. The need to switch a lot of ballast between the three has taken a lot of time before. If you only use stock ballast for everything, with the new hi-flow ballast you're only looking at a couple minutes. However, for those of us with 2000# ++ of ballast it can easily take 15 minutes or more to switch.

The upside is that you no longer have to list the boat dramatically; you can have the boat even in the water and still get a good surf wake and go from wakeboarding to surfing without any ballast changes in theory. (The ballast distribution and final weight are probably going to vary between the 'best' wakeboard wake and the 'best' surf wake. We also found in our first water demo that moving people to the surf side made for a slightly better wake, but that was with minimal ballast, so it may change fully sac'd out.)

The second upside is that for those that want a monster wake even weighting will allow you to actually put in more ballast overall because you don't have to worry about extreme list from having 4000# + on the surf side and can put a lot of weight left and right all the time. I'm guessing I might get as high as 4400# including factory and solid ballast, but I'm going to start with about 3200 and work my way up from there, tweaking as I go. I think on the MXZ with surf gate even weighting front to back will be better, so I'm thinking of putting my solid ballast mid-ship and possibly not going as big in the rear lockers.

The downside is that from personal experience and from many of the videos we've seen surf gate doesn't get a nice clean lip and there's spray that comes across the swim platform on the MXZ. A few videos have shown a very nice lip, however. Only time and tweaking will tell if we can get a nice clean lip and get the spray eliminated or to a minimum. Riding on the transom is legal on my lake and we spend a lot of time back there, so if I can't get rid of the spray that's a major downside. Even if you can ballast the snot out of it and clean the lip and the spray, some people may not want to have enough ballast to clean it up.