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its use of athletes and events to help demonstrate the various water sports in countries that are unfamiliar with them. While its Wake Games, held every April, is a chance for high-profile and up-and-coming amateur riders to show off their skills here at home, some of the company's international events are organized to show the public what these sports are, how they are done and to create an initial buzz behind a sport that, in many emerging markets, is very much on the fringe. Yeargin mentioned a trip last year to Kuwait, a country without any sort of waterskiing or wakeboarding culture. The company took one of its athletes, set up an event through a local dealer and invited influential people from the area. "In the U.S., almost everybody's been on a boat or been waterskiing or wakeboarding at some point at least once in their lives," he said. "There it's like, 'Oh, I didn't know you could do that, what's going on?' It's a ton of fun." Adding life to the company Based in Abilene, deep within the flatlands of west-central Texas, Tigé Boats bills itself as a wakesurf and wakeboard company, a sign of surfing's newfound prominence that many manufacturers are betting will stick around for years to come. Tigé president Rick Correll has dedicated the company's engineering resources to building bigger, surf-friendly waves behind its latest models. Likening sport boats to athletic equipment, he wants his company to be at the forefront of the trend. It claims its new Convex VX hull produces the "biggest, cleanest and most powerful surf wave ever created behind a boat." The company is also developing a new boat to be released this fall that, Correll says, will dramatically change the wakeboard and wakesurf markets. He added these new engineering challenges have added tremendous life to the company, and has made this the most fun job he's had in an approximately 30-year marine career. "This is about producing something that has dramatic changes in the ability to customize the boat to the owner," he said. Today's water sports boats "have the ability in your boat to control both the lift of the boat, the weight in the boat and the speed of the boat very precisely," Correll said. "We have four ballast points with different pumps and measuring devices so you can exactly weigh a boat and 46 | Boating Industry | October 2013 P42x47-BI13OCT-MarketTrends.indd 46 Photo courtesy of Tigé /// Market Trends /// Tigé Boats expects wakesurfing and wakeskating to further grow in popularity going forward. save it for the next time you want to run and it will save your speed, your plate settings, your weight and re-setup the boat for you to reproduce that ride, because it can be a lot to try to remember every time." Beyond surfing, Tigé is also betting on wakeskating — currently a small niche, but one that's predicted to continue growing in popularity. The company also sees a slight uptick in waterskiing, which it attributes to a widespread public interest in health conscious activities that's boosting the entire water sports category. To reach skating's young, athletic audience, Tigé has tweaked its marketing by releasing new videos every two weeks, sometimes just twominute clips. Correll stressed the importance of third-party messengers as valuable sales tools, rather than voices from within the company. Ballast baggage As the market demands ever more complicated boats with elaborate ballast systems, sport boat prices have skyrocketed. Constrained economies of scale and raw material prices are major factors, and Correll worries the sky-high boat prices are pushing people out of the market. "Five years ago we produced a boat that didn't really have any ballast in it, just a little pipe tower and toggle switches on the dash," he said. "Now everything is operated through touchscreens, automated ballast systems with multiple pumps, inclinometers, gyroscopes, GPS, heaters, showers and all of these things have evolved in the boats, so the content has gone up, as has the price." With advanced ballast systems comes another added cost: more engineering and safety testing. Sport boats with ballast can lean drastically to one side or another. Safety and endurance testing must respond in kind, accommodating the extremes of all possible ballast settings to make sure the boats are infallibly safe. "When you just had a throttle and a steering wheel that was one thing," Correll said. "Now you have ballast and you're putting water in, leaning the boat over to one side and … you have to put in safety measures that don't allow the operator to make mistakes like trying to run that boat at top speed with only one side of the boat filled with ballast." Tubing is still king Speaking with the boat builders and perusing the enthusiast media, one could get the impression that surfing, skating and boarding have all but buried the old-fashioned tow-behind tube. To the contrary, WSIA's Meddock said tubing sales still comprise approximately 40 percent of all products sold in the billion-dollar water sports industry. For a greater look at the accessory and toy side of the market, we spoke with Mary Snyder at Full Throttle, Don Wallace at Liquid Force and Pete Surrette at O'Brien Watersports — all part of the Absolute Outdoor conglomerate that covers the water sports market from $120 towable tubes all the way up to $500-plus wakesurfers. At the entry-level, both in terms of price and required skill level, Snyder, vice president of marketing at Full Throttle, said the company's tube business has grown for the last several years. So far in 2013, with sub-par weather conditions, she www.BoatingIndustry.com 9/5/13 11:55 AM