Wakeboard Boats Cost So Much More Than You Think

Recreation is just too damn expensive nowadays. You need to spend six figures on a massive truck to tow your six-figure boat out to the lake, where you’ll then spend another six figures fueling it up for the day’s aquatic activities. It’s all just too much.

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Kerberos824 thinks so, at least, after picturing the new Ram 1500 Tungsten towing a $190,000 wakeboard boat out for a day on the lake. There’s only one problem with this mental image: $190,000 is way too cheap for a wakeboard boat.

If you tell MasterCraft’s website that you want to go wakeboarding, the first thing it’ll recommend to you is the company’s top-of-the-line wake boat: The X-Star S. It’s got seating for 16, it has 4,500 pounds of built-in ballast, there’s even a set of trim panels purely for shaping the wake when you’re out surfing. It also starts at, according to JD Power, $322,966.

That’s an absurd amount of money. That’s a home ownership amount of money, the kind of prices that are usually discussed in the context of 30-year mortgages. This should not be the amount of money that a boat — not a fishing boat or a transoceanic liner, but a hobby boat — commands.

Even the cheapest boat MasterCraft recommends, the NX22, barely squeezes in under Kerberos824’s price limit. It starts at $176,951 before a single option is added. I grew up wakeboarding, I love it, but god. You’re talking two Lexus LCs just for the boat.

Congratulations, Kerberos824, on your Comment Of The Day win. I was going to link “Sonic Reducer” by Dead Boys here, as it’s the intro music to the best how-to-wakeboard DVD box set I ever grew up watching, but it turns out the entire series is just up on YouTube for free. So, here’s how to wakeboard. I hope you weren’t planning on getting anything else done today.

“The Book” Part 1 – The Best Wakeboarding Instructional Ever