Theft by swindle

Theft by swindle: To take money from people without them even realizing what is happening! That’s how I feel about the wakeboat industry right now! I have been skiing for over 30 years and wakeboarding for about 15. I have owned lots of wakeboard boats and most recently I was an MC owner. I always wondered when the pyramid scheme of pricing would fall apart and I don’t know if it is going to happen soon, but one would think that it would have to. What I mean is that for the 15 years or so that I owned a wakeboard boat, I never lost money (in fact most of my boats went up in value and the ones I lost money on were more than offset by the ones I made money on). I don’t see that happening now that the prices are $70M to over $100M for a big name wakeboat. The new xstars for instance are well over $100M and while I would bet that MC sells very few of them and the ones we see are most likely promo boats that were obtained at a deep discount. I do feel sorry for the very few that went into a dealer, drank the koolaide and paid big bucks only to find out a year or 2 later that there boat is worth $50 or so less thousand than they paid…. I don’t care how rich you are this is just stupid.

Also the whole shift to surfing in order to reach a target market with enough money to buy a boat is lame. A lot of these people really have no riding ability or are old and beat up like me so wakeboarding and wakeskating are out of the picture for them. So they buy a barge and say they are “surfers” thinking its cool. It’s not, and its barely a hobby let alone a sport. I have put my dog on a surfboard behind my previous boat and she caught the wake for a bit so I conclude that really no skill is involved. Catching a wave on the ocean (traditional surfing) however is hard and is very cool!

So I am a sell-out…. sold the wakeboat for a cheap fishing boat and now I wakeskate all day long (I went with the fishing boat because I am not going to surf all day long and be bored to tears). I don’t have to care about the boat or even really take care of it for that matter and I am happy! It just confirmed that I got caught up in a material object (wakeboat) as opposed to really enjoying what I am up to!

That’s not to say that there are still some good values out there…like MB, that produce a good boat at a “relatively speaking” fair price.

Not trying to cause havoc but wondering if anyone else out there is seeing it this way….