Cable Wakeboarding

My introduction to the sport of wakeboarding was over a year ago. It was brief , but fun. It's not really a sport you can do on a regular basis , unless you owe your own boat ( or some of your friends do).

If you don’t owe a boat, but would like to get out on the water to wakeboard, you could try cable wakeboarding. Cable wakeboarding is ideal for riders who have limited or no access to a boat.

Cable wakeboarding is simply wakeboarding while being pulled not by a boat, but by an overhead cableski system. Suspended in the air by a series of towers (or masts) surrounding a small lake, an overhead cable rotates in a (usually) counterclockwise motion around the lake. Along the cable are a number of carriers from which ski ropes will attach to and pull a rider or skier around the lake.

There are over 140 cable parks all over the world, and more are on the drawing board, especially since the advent of wakeboarding. Though, the popularity of the sport is rising fast , in US there are just a few cable wake parks ( see the list here).

I like the concept behind cable wakeboarding : cableways are clean, efficient, quiet, and overall, very environmentally friendly.

Also, looks like cable wakeboarding is less expensive than boat wakeboarding. Cable park rates vary from around US$18-25 for one hour, to about US$40-50 or so for an all day pass. That's pretty much what we pay for a snowboarding/ski day pass.

Cable parks are not limited to wakeboarding only ( even though wakeboarding clearly dominates the cable scene these days ), you still occasionally see people on two skis, slaloming, or kneeboarding.

As more cable parks are built around US, I hope that just soon enough, the sport of cable wakeboarding will reach our state ( though we are still waiting on that whitewater kayaking park in Monroe :).