Wake board park coming to Foxton

A young girl goes cable wake boarding in Hawke's Bay. Foxton is about to get its own cable wake boarding park this month.

Foxton is about to get a major new tourism and recreation venture, with a cable wakeboard park planned to open before Christmas.

The park, on Stewart St, would be the third currently operating in the New Zealand, with the others in Taupo and Hawke's Bay.

Its centrepiece is a man made lake and motorised cables suspended nine metres above the water between towers each end of the lake.

Wakeboarders hold on to towropes attached to the cables for a 180m-long ride.

A floating ramp, known as a kicker, would allow customers to do jumps and trick manoeuvres.

The park also planned to have kayaks and paddle boards for hire, and possibly a
pump cycle track in the future, resource consent documents show.

The business, called Off the Loop and owned by Foxton residents Glen Butcher, Angela Cook and Dean Stella, has been under development for more than 18 months.
It gained resource consent in August with its first test runs in October.

Mr Butcher is also the owner of Wind Warriors, a kite board business at Foxton
Beach, and a former international kite board competitor.

Wind Warriors described kite boarding as wakeboarding with the freedom to go
anywhere—"cable when it's calm, kite when it's windy".

With Off the Loop being the only cable park in the lower North Island, its operators had high hopes for attracting riders from as far afield as Wellington and boosting Foxton tourism.

The park had capacity for 12 riders an hour and, over summer,its operators hoped to attract 132 customers daily and employ three staff. Ride prices were yet to be released.

Cable water skiing was invented in the 1950s in Europe where it is a popular sport, with hundreds of cable parks, some with cables 800m long.