Safety/Weight Capacity/Ballast/People

[4michael]

Setting my boat up to surf with 800 lbs of ballast in stern and 750 lbs in floor ski locker. That adds up to 1,550 lbs.

Boat capacity is 12 pasaangers or 2,698 lbs. That leaves about 1,200 lbs.

Is everyone sticking to that or is there room to go over? Wanting to figure out how many passengers I can surf with.

 

[Noko]

Women are usually lighter than men. My suggestion would be to limit yourself to 11 women.

 

[Sotally Tober]

So I’ve added about 400lbs of Batteries, 400lbs of audio equipment and 300lbs of gear. I limit my crew to 10.

 

[FSH 210 Sport]

Setting my boat up to surf with 800 lbs of ballast in stern and 750 lbs in floor ski locker. That adds up to 1,550 lbs.

Boat capacity is 12 pasaangers or 2,698 lbs. That leaves about 1,200 lbs.

Is everyone sticking to that or is there room to go over? Wanting to figure out how many passengers I can surf with.

Passenger weight is usually less than the total cargo weight. My boats total cargo weight is 2200 pounds of cargo and people, but the 10 people should only be 1860 pounds.

I‘d stick to what Yamaha states is your maximum weight for the boat.

 

[Julian]

Most people completely ignore those capacity weights when it comes to surfing. I was at a surf boat dealership (I'll leave the name off) and was looking at their boats and capacities and they were "selling" that I could increase the boat's stock ballast by something like 1000lbs, and when I asked if that meant that I could only have 4 200lb people on board he looked at me strangely and asked why. I pointed out the 1800lb limit on the capacity for the boat and he shrugged and didn't know what to say.

Bottom line....I know that most people surfing are probably WAY over their capacity limits....surf at your own risk.....

 

[FSH 210 Sport]

Most people completely ignore those capacity weights when it comes to surfing. I was at a surf boat dealership (I'll leave the name off) and was looking at their boats and capacities and they were "selling" that I could increase the boat's stock ballast by something like 1000lbs, and when I asked if that meant that I could only have 4 200lb people on board he looked at me strangely and asked why. I pointed out the 1800lb limit on the capacity for the boat and he shrugged and didn't know what to say.

Bottom line....I know that most people surfing are probably WAY over their capacity limits....surf at your own risk.....

That reads like your typical accident report / NTSB plane crash report.

Or, How could this accident have been prevented?

 

[jcyamaharider]

Weight and position of weight is 2 totally different things when it comes to surfing, just because you have "X" amount of weight in the boat doesn't mean it is in the correct spot. You will need to reposition people when you ballast up for proper weighting. We run the 24ft transom bag ( 825-850ish)
ski locker bag full ( 700ish), port side bag full ( 400), about 150 pounds in the starboard bag and 200 pounds of lead in the front. That's 2300 in just ballast. When we load the boat up like this we only have my 2 daughters and either myself or my wife in the boat. When we have others in the boat our weighting goes down to compensate for the people in the boat. The boat doesn't feel unsafe and we are usually in calm water when we surf. The boat can handle the weight, it is just what you feel comfortable with.

 

[spatty99]

The wake boat capacity plate is passengers and cargo, but ballast does NOT count against it. In other words, you can add passengers up to the capacity and then add ballast weight as well. Yamaha is the opposite. I'm not sure exactly why the huge difference (I suspect the build class of boats, as jet boats have their own special floatation rules; plus generally lighter jet boat construction) but owner manuals explicitly call out the difference.