Water Ski Ropes & Handles

Video Transcript

I'm Jodi Fisher with Jodi's Ski School in Orlando, Florida and for Expert Village today I'm going to talk to you about handles and ropes for water skiing. First of all for general two skiing and slalom skiing, we would have a rope—standard full length of a rope is 60 feet. You can see how the rope is in the colors of the rainbow: this depicts the various different shortenings. When you move and advance on to slalom skiing, for the slalom course, you can start shortening up the rope where you would have to complete the slalom course at the same speed but, on a slightly shorter rope. So they go from 50 off, 22 off, 28 feet off, 32, 35, 38 feet, 39 off, 41 off, and then 43 off where the world record. 43 off is 43 feet off of a full 75 foot rope, so at this point, the rope is very short and would not reach out to the slalom course board on the outside, where the skier would have to maneuverer a turn around that turn point. Very short, but very exciting. The slalom handle has a aluminum bar wrapped in rubber. Very good grip. They come in various different diameters, depending on the size of your hand, which would allow you to have a comfortable grip to fit your hand. Moving on to trick skiing, this is a shorter rope. We would trick ski at our slowest speed, somewhere between 15 miles a hour for children up to about 22 miles a hour for the adults that are doing the faster bigger tricks. We have a braided handle here, which allows you to wrap the rope around you and still have some grip to be able to hold on to the line, and the same kind of aluminum bar coated in rubber for a good grip. Then we have what we called a bear trap: this is a toe harness that you can put on to your foot with a heel strap and they let you do toe turns holding onto the rope with your foot.

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