Wakeboarding is America’s fastest growing water sport. It’s essentially a combination of water skiing and snowboarding. Wakeboarders ride on a board slightly larger than a snowboard and ride on top of the water at speeds around 20 miles per hour. Beginners love that wakeboarding is fun, easy to learn, and allows everyone to progress their skill level at their own pace. Experienced wakeboarders love that they can amp up the adrenaline by launching themselves into the air over man-made jumps. The wakeboarder swerves and cuts the water by rocking the board. The boats tend to be slightly less expensive than those used for waterskiing, making the sport even more attractive. As with many freestyle sports such as snowboarding and surfing, there is almost a separate language of terms to describe various tricks, such as off-axis, tantrum, elephant, and whirlybird. The sport is growing in popularity as it is fairly easy to pick up, but offers a wide opportunity for self-expression.
A new sport on the horizon is cable wakeboarding. In fact, there are only a few places in the United States where you can actually do it. In cable wakeboarding, a high-tech “pulley system drives riders around a body of water as opposed to riders being pulled around by a boat. Learning to cable wakeboard is much easier than learning to ride behind a boat for a variety of reasons. In cable wakeboarding you load off of a dock as opposed to trying to learn how to get up on the board while already in the water and fighting against the waves. Cable wakeboarding is entirely predictable since the parks where this is done are manmade. This makes learning and adjusting much easier for beginners. Cable wakeboarding is great for experienced riders because they can use the cable system to do enormous air tricks or hit one of our various floating sliders. Finally, rather than needing access to a boat and a large body of water, anyone can simply to the park and immediately start wakeboarding.
Wake-boarding is said to be the fastest growing water sport in the world. Practiced on lakes or the sea, it’s like a combination of snowboarding, waterskiing and skateboarding or a cross between mono skiing and surfing. Although it may contain an essence of all these activities, wakeboarding is most definitely a water sport in its own right. If you can water ski, then it’s likely that you’ll pick up wakeboarding without too much trouble.
Source: “What Is Wakeboarding?” More Sports. Web. 20 May 2013.
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