Look ma, no boat!

COURTESY PHOTO A wakeboarded gets some serious air at a North Fort Myers cable park. He's being pulled around a 14-acre lake at 19 mph on a rope attached to an electric motor. One of eight "cable parks" in the country opened last summer on a 14-acre lake in North Fort Myers. Owner Nick DiMasi called his park Revolution, because the main attraction is a cable with an electric pulley system that whisks wakeboarders, water skiers, kneeboarders or wakeskaters around the lake.

"I also like (the name) because I'm from Boston," Mr. DiMasi said.

Water sports enthusiasts like the idea because it's a convenient way to get on the water without having to use a boat. And all the gear — helmets, lifejackets and boards — is for rent at the park, so all they need to bring is a swimsuit.

Two electric motors drive the system and cost only about $1 per hour to run.

Seven wakeboarders at a time

can ride the cable. They hang on

to 70-foot-long ropes spaced 300 feet apart, and are pulled around the lake at 19 mph. One revolution takes about 90 seconds. If someone falls off, he or she simply swims back to shore and go again. For $25, a wakeboarder can have two hours on the cable, including all the rental gear.

DiMasi It was popular this summer, Mr. DiMasi said, but tourist season hasn't been so busy.

"With school back in session and the temperature a lot cooler, we've progressively slowed down," he said.

Still, water sports enthusiasts like Fort Myers resident Kent Caldwell came by to check out the park last week with his son, Wills.

"It's cheaper for me to bring him out here for two hours than to clean my boat at home and buy fuel and everything else," Mr. Caldwell said.

Wills Caldwell, 16, likes to water ski, but had never tried it at a cable park. He liked the idea of having the jumps and obstacles in the water. "It's just like riding the flats all the time, instead of riding in a boat's wake," he said. "It'll be different."

Blurring the lines between work and play

Mr. DiMasi, 33, said surfers in Germany started cable parks back in 1958, because there was a lack of waves that year. His first encounter with one was during childhood trips to Orlando; he was in college when he started thinking about building his own cable park.

COURTESY PHOTO A wakeboarder skims over a roof-like structure while being towed by an electric motor. In the background, other skiers wait their turn. On spring break from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, where Mr. DiMasi had started a water skiing club, he and a group of friends took a trip to wakeboard at the cable park in Fort Bragg, N.C. He was just as impressed as he'd been as a child. Even so, he moved to Florida after college and got a mechanical engineering job, but was laid off five years later when the company moved to Mexico.

That's when he decided to put his engineering degree to use in building a cable park with the help of partner Dayle Cartwright. In 2003, they started the lengthy process of gaining permits and approval for the $250,000 project.

"It took longer than college," Mr. DiMasi said. "There were many, many times along the way I wanted to give up."

They initially wanted to build their park in Collier County, but officials there shot down the plan because of concerns about how much noise the cable would make — although the electric engines are actually very quiet. There was also worry about the type of crowd wakeboarding would attract, Mr. DiMasi said. "It's not Woodstock," he added. "We pride ourselves on being a family park." (Alcohol isn't allowed on the grounds).

While waiting for approval and permits for the North Fort Myers site, Mr. DiMasi learned that the cable park in Fort Bragg had closed and he could buy the old cable. He loaded it in a semi-truck and he drove it back to Fort Myers, where it was refurbished.

It sat for two years while the foundation for the cable system — six posts secured in 8-foot square blocks of cement — was built and the park around it was landscaped.

The land beyond the lake includes a ¾-mile-long nature trail with a floating bridge across the southern corner of the lake, which Mr. DiMasi and his friends — some of whom are structural engineers — built with $10,000 worth of lumber. The lake also borders nearly 20 acres of pristine wetlands. As part of the deal with Lee County, Mr. DiMasi was required to plant 263 native trees and 4,200 plants on the land.

An added environmental benefit of the cable system is that it infuses oxygen into the water at a rate of five tons per year, which reduces bacteria. "It helps the fish, the plants and increases water clarity," Mr. DiMasi said.

He plans to build a separate, straight-line cable at the north end of the lake that will only take one person at a time — good for beginners, but also for more experienced wake boarders who want to practice tricks.

Like the Arnold Toynbee quote that hangs in his office, "The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play," Mr. DiMasi has merged his love of water sports with some engineering elbow grease to create the cable park.

"It's actually a really fun job being here," he said.