Timr71

Ok, Let's assume that there are still people out that that like to slalom ski or at least would like to have a pair of combo skis with them on their boat. There are expensive and hard to find ski racks that are made to mount on towers. However, many towers have the standard finger rack that will hold both wake boards and surf boards. I have such a rack for my Skylon. But I'd like to get two slalom skis out of the floor of my boat. One night when I couldn't sleep, I started to think that the Y shaped racks that are used to mount guns onto 4-wheelers might be able to be repurposed for holding water skis. I let those thoughts marinade for a few months, and now that we have the 'Rona I went to Bass Pro Shop with my mask to do some shopping. What I found greatly exceeded my expectations. I found a pair of multi-purpose clamps that could be used in a lot of ways. The manufacturer is Koplin Outdoors and the product is labled: Rhino Grip XLr [picture below] These Y shaped clamps are big enough to hold a water ski, they're rubber coated, and they have a stretchable rubber strap that closes the opening. They can be mounted to both flat surfaces and to rods / poles. In fact, You could use these to also fabricate ski holders under the gunnels where the combing pads are. You'd need to cut a rod to use as a mounting point. I repurposed a cheap skim board that my son purchased years ago on a beach trip. This particular skim board cost roughly $30 and was pink. But the key was that it fit nicely into my wakeboard rack. In the pictures below, you'll see that the duct tape on the board gave me an indication of where the fingers from the rack were reside. The Rhino Grip Y shaped clamp lifts the ski high enough to get it over the board rack. Carefully, I measured out and managed to place two sets of Y clamps onto the board so that 2 slalom skis or a pair of combo skis will fit on this rack and then the entire structure will slide into a wakeboard rack. I hope my pictures below will tell the rest of the story. But if you have questions let me know. If you're like me, the more items you can get out of the floor of the boat the better. Especially if you spend all day out of the lake and need to have all of your toys with you at the same time.

I knew that I was going to overhaul my dashboard as part of my ski boat restoration. But whey would you want a devise like a GPS Chart Plotter / Fish finder that's generally used by fisherman? Well, for a couple of reasons. 1. The GPS part can make navigating your lake or unfamiliar lakes much better. Even if you know your lake like the back of your hand...the chart plotter can be a huge help navigating at night. More on that later. 2. Everyone want to know how deep the water is at any given place on the lake. Isn't better to know what the bottom actually looks like and see if it's rising up at a good clip, or if there's something down there that you don't want to run over in the future? With these thoughts in mind, I decided to put a Lowrance GPS Fishfinder into my dash. Many of these devices come with a pedestal so you can mount them pretty much anywhere. But I wanted to flush mount mine in the dash and I had room to do it. My available space was the primary factor in choosing the model that I did. You can find both landscape and portrait models, then pick what'll work you. I chose the Lowrance Hook 4, because of it's portrait orientation, and footprint. In the first pic you can see the unit plus the transducer. The unit itself was about $250 and the flush mount bracket was another $29. In the pics you can see where I planned to place it. There was an existing panel that contained all of the relevant slalom course times. This is an older three event AWSA tournament certified ski boat. I wanted to preserve that panel so I replicated it in HPDE then wrapped it with 3M carbon fiber sheets. Once I had the unit mounted in my new dash plate, we had to set up the transducer. I don't have a good picture of this, but it is bedded in epoxy inside the hull. I chose to put it there and let it shoot through the hull as apposed to hang something else off the back of my transom. This can be tricky, but thankfully, my cousin and I got it bedded properly on the first try. I had had no issues with it. The views of the bottom of the lake are clear. The only downside to shooting it though the hull is that the water temp gauge will not read accurately. I've had this in my boat for 2 seasons now and I can say that I'm thrilled with it. If only I knew how to leverage more of the features of the device itself. We go to the fireworks every year on the 4th of July, and I was able to use the track plotter to mark my route on the way there in the daylight. Then going home, I just had to follow my own navigation bread crumbs. Made it easy to avoid shallow spots and obstructions that are hard to see in the dark.