Wakeboarding

Wakeboarding is a water sport like water skiing or surfing. It is categorized as an extreme sport in the world today because of the height and air some wakeboarders get when their on the water. Another reason it is categorized as an extreme sport is because of the acrobatic manuevers that some wakeboarders perform on a wakeboard. A wakeboard is a rectangular board in which the two longer sides are curved outwards to make it wider in the middle but thinner towards each end of the board. There are fins on the bottom of the board to help the rider balance easier on the water. There are two spots to put your feet in to lock you into the board; Your holding onto a rope tied to the end of a boat that is pulling you through the lake or the ocean and sometimes big rivers.

Places to Wakeboard in Illinois

Although there are many many lakes in Illinois, there is only a handfull of them in which you can actually wakeboard in. By this it means that some lakes have a limited amount of horsepower or H.P that the boats on the lake can have. Heres a list of lakes in Illinois that are big enough and permit wakeboarding in them:

• Rend Lake, which is 19,000 acres and located in Benton, Illinois.
• Kinkaid Lake, which is 2,700 acres and eight miles long; It is located in The Shawnee National Forest.
• Fox Lake, which is just northwest of Chicago. It also includes ramps.
• Lake of Egypt, Which is located just off of I-57 and I-24, this lake also includes ramps
• Crab Orchard Lake, which is located five miles east of Carbondale, Illinois. This lake also has ramps.

History of Wakeboarding and How it Got Started

For a very long time surfing was the ultimate sport for people who loved the water. Some people even recall sometimes seeing surfers being towed behind motor boats witha ski roap; And sometimes even off the shoreline by a truck. And then in 1985 a surfer named Tony Finn invented something called the "skurfer", it was a hybrid of a water ski and a surfboard; It was much smaller than a surfboard but much fatter than a water ski. It was pulled by a boat while the rider performed surf like tricks and manuevers in the wake. The tricks and manuevers they would do were a mix of skateboarding and snowboarding with a little bit of water skiing. For the rest of the decade Tony Finn dedicated himself to promoting the skurfer. In this the sport of skiboarding was born. Although the first skurfer championships were televised on ESPN in 1990 the sport was still struggling. This was mostly from lack of technology and innovation. Only very experienced or very strong riders could start in deep water. This was because the skurfer was very narrow and buoyant. A man named Herb O'Brien, who was the owner of H.O sports and a sucessfull business man in water sports, started examining the skurfer to see if he could improve it. A few short years later he introduced the first compression-molded neutral-buoyancy wakeboard, it was called the hyperlite. This innovation sparked the growth of what is now called wakeboarding. For a while some people still called in skurfing and skiboarding but eventually the name wakeboard stuck with it. O'brien kept changing and refining his new creation of the wakeboard. And as the sport of wakeboarding grew more popular as did the boards that the riders used. In 1993 Jimmy Redmon created the "twin tip design" which is a symmetrical shape that is still what the current wakeboards of today are.The twin tip boards have a fin on each side of the board so it's easy for a rider to ride in regular or goofie stance. Today the main wakeboarding organization in the world is "The World Wakeboarding Association". It was founded in 1989 by Jimmy Redmon, who some consider the guru of wakeboarding. He is in charge of developing the rules and regulations of the sport to keep the sport of wakeboarding in it's present form.

How to and Tips to Wakeboarding

One thing about wakeboarding is throughout the many wakeboarders in the world there a very different skill levels. By this I mean it is very hard to get started and be able to even get up on the wakeboard in the water and ride, and it's even harder to get better and better. Another important thing to learning how to wakeboard is having a good boat driver that has pulled wakeboarders before. The first thing you need to do is figure out if your goofy or regular; This is what stance you will have on the board. To find this out all you need to do is stand on the board outside of the water and see how it feels. If you feel more comfortable with your left foot in front of your right then your stance is regular, if you feel more comfortable with your right foot in front of your left then your stance is goofy.To get up and be able to ride you start in the water with your feet tightly locked into the wakeboards foot holds. You want to lay on your back with the wakeboard on top of the water, with the bottom of the wakeboard facing the boat that is pulling you. Hold the roap over the middle of the top of the board and bend your knees at about a 85 to 90 degree angle. Now your ready to get go. Wait for the water to calm down so it isn't so choppy, you want the water to resemble glass as much as possible, you want it to be flat and smooth so you can have a nice ride. Signal the driver that your ready, and if he is a good boat driver he'll go about five miles per hour for a few foot then gun it up to 17-24 miles per hour. And in the time of him going five miles per hour to 17-24 miles per hour you need to push down on your back foot and lean back at the same time. This will pull your board to the top of the water facing the boat, and if you stay leaning back with your legs bent it will keep you riding on the water.