Andrea Fountain
This 28-year-old two-time world
and 10-time national champion from Lake Ohakuri and
Greenhith, Auckland, New
Zealand, has been wakeboarding
for 16 years.
Why I love wakeboarding: “It’s
brought me a good time. There’s
nothing like having friends and
family out on the boat, creating
memories you have for life!”
Advice? “Have fun with it! It
helps if you get some lessons
because good technique on the
basic skills is priceless. Check
out Shaun Murray’s camp The
Boarding School.
How did you get started? “I
started riding at 12 with a
directional skurfer (skurfboards
eventually became wakeboards)
behind an inflatable dinghy! But
I started learning 180s at 17
once we had bought a small
boat and sacked it up and put a
homemade pole on it!”
X-Games champ Dallas Friday, from Orlando, Florida, was voted #1 female rider by Wake- boarding Magazine for eight years in a row.
Who inspired you? “My brother
and a couple of his mates were
getting into it so of course I was
never one to sit and watch. We
had actually been skurfing with
a surfboard for about a year
or so before we got our first
Neptune directional board. I
took a lot of beatings! But the
more I learned, the more I got
addicted to that feeling.
Why do you love wakeboarding? “There’s nothing like that
feeling of landing a new trick for
the first time. The adrenaline is
so good!”
2004 to 2006, and 20 percent
from 2006 to 2008.
Future sales can’t be
predicted based on history,
especially in this economy.
Wakeboard-related revenues
fell in 2009 along with sales
throughout the boating indus-
try. It’s possible that the sport’s
rapid rise and sales of wake-
boarding boats and accessories
may have peaked, but prob-
ably not. The sport’s popular-
ity and profitability were due
partly to loose credit, televi-
sion, and home equity, grow-
ing in a freewheeling, free-
spending era when consumers
embraced all things “extreme.”
Sports, snacks, drinks, and
even deodorants wore the
label proudly. When cable
network FuelTV was launched
in 2003, extreme sports such
as wakeboarding got expo-
nentially more airtime, just as
home prices soared. Flush with
cash borrowed against home
equity, shoppers eagerly fueled
the growth of wakeboarding,
and bought big boats with big
wakes, boards, gear, and all the
flashy accessories.
