It’s about three months later since I first learned the deep water start. I’ve been doing it all summer. And I’ve come to the conclusion that the absolute secret of an easy, effortless start is the soft pull by the boat.

First a little of what I mean by the soft pull. I’m referring to the initial acceleration of the boat from stopped to moving. It’s a gradual pull instead of a jerky one. It’s a slow acceleration instead of an instant one. It’s moving the boat softly instead of just gunning it.

A soft pull doesn’t have to take a long time. Here’s one of my first times getting up (same video as is on my About Me page).

Does this look like it takes an unusually long time for me to get up? No. But what I got from the boat driver in this video is a soft pull:

As I mentioned the home page, I found that when I get a soft pull, getting up is almost effortless. When the boat first starts to move, I feel myself cutting through the water instead of feeling like I’m being dragged through a wall.

One of my expert friends said he wants a hard pull because he’d rather get up as quickly as possible. But I’m convinced that’s because if a hard pull is all he knows, he’s thinking of dragging through the water and having to use a lot of strength to hold on.

With a soft pull, it’s just the opposite. I found holding on isn’t difficult at all when I’m cutting through the water.

As I mentioned on the home page, my theory about why the soft pull works so well is this: When you move forward in any fashion, you’re going to rise up due to the fact that water pushes against the bottom of the ski, which is at an angle.

If the boat begins the pull softly before it accelerates, you’ve already risen up quite a bit before the boat speeds up and therefore you don’t have as much water pushing against you, making it easy.

But with a hard pull, you’re going so fast right away that water pushes against you before you’ve risen up much, and it’s a wall of water slamming against you.

I have a friend who has been doing deep water starts for a while. The other day we were both skiing behind a boat that has a throttle cable instead of a fly-by-wire. It was the driver who is used to giving me soft pulls, and he automatically did the same for her without thinking about it.

She later commented that she popped up right away without all the jarring on her body.

Now the key to getting this type of start is the driver. If they’re not used to thinking about it, it might be a little tricky. When I didn’t get up on the first try, one driver said she did give me a soft pull. But on the second try when I made it, she said she could tell the difference and realized the first hadn’t been as soft as she thought it was.

It’s definitely harder to give a soft pull with a fly-by-wire boat than a throttle cable, but not impossible. I go to a waterskiing party once a week in the summer, and it’s usually the same driver with a fly-by-wire boat. I now have no trouble getting up as long as I remind him to give me a soft pull.