I've got about 1200 engine hours behind the wheel of various tournament ski boats, two I've owned and those of my ski buddies. I was in a 3 boat rotation for many years with 2 other guys. We trailered because we skied on a number of local lakes and we could launch or trailer a boat in under a minute. All 3 of us knew the drill. When we put the boat on the trailer, one guy would get the truck and trailer and drop the trailer in the water just the right amount. The owner would drive the boat on to the trailer and the last guy would hop out and hook the nose. The MasterCrafts had a spring loaded pin and you didn't even need to get out and hook the boat. Then we would pull the boat out of the way, tighten the nose hook, pull the drain plug and we would all wipe it down before we all went our separate ways.
This is some old video of me skiing the slalom course at 34.2 mph 28 off.
TN doesn't require any classes for you to register a boat, so we frequently saw people with expensive brand new boats who didn't have a clue how to launch or trailer boats. Sometimes we would offer to help just to get things moving. Other times we sat back and enjoyed the show if the new owner was completely losing his Sh#t!
Getting a boat back on the trailer isn't always where things end. One time I saw a trailered boat going up a hill by the ramp and the owner apparently didn't have the trailer's backup chains on the hitch. He didn't have the ball secured well either and the trailer came unhitched, the nose of the trailer dropped enough for the nose wheel to touch down and the trailer promptly turned around and picked up speed rolling back into the lake nose first after bouncing off a car. The boat was floating above the fully submerged trailer anchored to the trailer by the nose hook.
Another time a young drunk couple out on a freshly but poorly repaired PWC that was obviously sinking. We offered assistance and they refused. The driver thought he could restart a swamped engine. They didn't seem to have a clue what was going on. So the two of them drifted in the middle of the channel for about half an hour. The 2nd time we offered assistance they accepted and we took them aboard and towed their partially submerged PWC to a beach on a cove not too far away where they started from. There was a houseboat there and everyone there was wasted. Apparently someone had wrecked that PWC just a couple weeks ago and they didn't even water test the boat after the repair. They were happy we rescued the PWC and invited us up to drink with them.
Another time a family had a rental houseboat and had gotten a line wrapped around their prop and they were drifting towards a bunch of rocks. Houseboats are required by law to have anchors, but the owner renting the boat had a few renters cut the anchors free and decided renters couldn't be trusted with an anchor. I got to tow them to safety and at the time I had my houseboat out, so we anchored our boat and lashed them to the side of our boat while we freed their prop. They hung out with us until the next morning and offered to pay us for helping them. We refused, but the houseboat owner drove out early the next morning looked his boat over and never even thanked us before he left.
These are just a few of many incidents I've seen, but I've also had a lot of great time out on the area lakes. It feels like a lifetime ago, but my kids loved the houseboat. We would tie up to the shore in a narrow cove just off of a cove with a slalom course in it for entire weekends. We'd anchor a large inflatable volcano out in front that that you could swim up through the middle to get inside and people would jump off the roof of the houseboat. Good times!
Woke up to a large print completing. The upper base is printing now.
12 hours of printing yesterday got me these.
![Luca [OT]](/data/avatars/s/3235/3235113.jpg?1697196734){kind=avatar}