Wakeboarding and water skiing involves a degree of skill. Not many people will be able to strap on a wakeboard or pair of water skis and start wakeboarding or water skiing immediately.

Like learning to ride a bike, its an unatural thing to do and it takes a while for your body and mind to understand what’s required.

But you don’t have to be able to wakeboard or water ski to have fun being towed behind a speed boat, power boat or motor boat. There is a huge range of towable inflatables available that don’t involve any skill to ride.

So when I bought my first pre-owned speed boat, I looked around for a suitable inflatable.

If I were buying an inflatable for a toddler or young child to ride, I probably wouldn’t need anything particularly large or robust as the child would be light and I probably wouldn’t be driving the boat at full speed!

But my children are large teenagers and I knew they wouldn’t be very impressed unless they were being towed flat out. So I had to find an inflatable that was robust enough to cope.

I searched the internet and found Sports Stuff who have a wide range of top of the range inflatables. I was particularly attracted to their Sumo (watch the video on that page to find out why!)

Unfortunately these top of the range inflatables come at top of the range prices! And Sports Stuff are in the US but I live in the UK  where there isn’t much Sports Stuff  equipment around.

So I set up a “Saved Search” on eBay for a Sports Stuff Sumo so I would be alerted as soon as any were listed for sale on eBay in the UK. And sure enough, eventually one was listed and I was able to buy it at a fraction of the cost of a new one.

Once again, buying pre-owned equipment on eBay made speed boating fun much more affordable.