Speed On The Water

Caught up with Peter Hledin, the owner of Douglas Marine, which builds Skater catamarans in Douglas, Mich. Hledin remains one of my favorite people in the high-performance marine industry to inteview, particularly for his extensive base of knowledge that’s always tempered with a dry sense of humor. More important, I never feel that Hledin is being cagey with me. He goes “off the record” from time to time, but for the most part he’s on the record—often bluntly—and I respect that.

Hledin has been making news of late, most recently for offering a purse for the fastest “pleasure” Skaters at the Lake of the Ozarks Shootout August 28-29. Hledin is putting up $10,000 for the fastest Skater at the Shootout, and if the cat breaks 190 mph he’ll double that purse.

“This event is for the boat owners,” said Hledin. “Most of the guys who are doing the Shootout are there because of their own competitive instincts, and because they want the notoriety. The key to this business is making sure your customers are having the time of their lives. It’s not about the boat builder, it’s not about the engine builder, it’s about the boat owner and his family and friends.

“The owners make it all happen,” he added. “They provide us with a living.”

Skater’s repair of JBS Racing, a 50-foot-long turbine-powered Mystic has also made news and elicited plenty of comment on the message boards of offshoreonly.com.

“They had kind of a small fracture in the bottom at Lake St. Clair (Mich.),” said Hledin. “It was not a big deal—it was a two-day repair. We spent more time fixing the trailer than the boat. But for John (Cosker, the owner of Mystic Performance Boats) to fix it up here would have been next to impossible. The boat is back here now on an unrelated issue. A propeller went through the bottom. Not related and, again, not a big deal.

“It’s not that John’s boats are ‘falling apart,’” Hledin added. “Not at all. It’s just the nature of boat racing. Race boats break.”

Anything “extreme” makes for good copy and even better video. And across the boating spectrum, there’s plenty of stuff that qualifies as extreme—even in sailing. (What do you expect? I’m a high-performance powerboat guy and I’m expected to take shots at sailors.)

So when my editor at Boats.com, John Burnham, a stinking sailor, asked me to compile and manage a four-part online series on “extreme boating” I was up for the job. That assignment was especially compelling because he asked me to use Lenny Rudow to handle fishing, Jeff Hemmel to cover the personal watercraft side and Kimball Livingston, another stinking sailor but a damn good writer, to handle the sailing end. I covered the high-performance side.

Short story: I couldn’t have asked for a better team. Not surprisingly, they're all colleagues of mine at Boatermouth.com, which is conglomerate of daily blogs from 12  top writers in the marine industry.

The series, which will appear on Boats.com next week, combines text and video to showcase the extremes of boating. And much as the high-flying aerial antics in Hemmel’s PWC segment blows my mind, much as the completely automated “Frankenboat” fish slayer in Rudow’s segment cracks me, the stuff that completely knocks me out is in Livingston’s sailing portion. There’s something about nature at its worst—and voluntarily heading out in it—that qualifies as truly extreme.

As for the high-performance boating segment, it taps into offshore racing, poker runs and even manufacturing with Sunsation. For the hardcore performance-boat enthusiast, none of it will come as a revelation (though there’s some very cool video from the Florida Powerboat Club and the Miss Geico turbine-powered racing catamaran). But the average visitor who comes to Boats.com, and there are 3 million of them each month, should find it plenty entertaining.

I’ll let you know when the first segment appears.

Had a nice chat with Fred Kiekhaefer, the president of Mercury Racing, over the weekend. Kiekhaefer told me that construction of the first “production” pair of the company’s twin-turbocharged 1,350-hp engines was underway.

When I told him I would have been disappointed with anything less because had Mercury Racing representatives had repeatedly promised that production of the quad-overhead cam powerplants would begin in July, Kiekhaefer chuckled.

“Well, it was darn near the end of July,” he said. “But July, nevertheless.”

Production of the engine reportedly is sold out through March 2011.

Caught up with Terry Sobo, the director of sales and marketing for Nor-Tech Hi-Performance Boats in Cape Coral, Fla. Sobo told me he’d just finished the lottery drawing for a slot to order a new Nor-Tech model—such is the unprecedented demand for custom performance-boats these days.

OK, Sobo was joking and indulging in a little “gallows humor.” Late summer never is a booming time for the performance-boat business, and the current economy has done nothing to help change that. We enjoyed a good laugh, especially when Sobo told me the tents were already being pitched on the Nor-Tech plant lawn for tomorrow’s lottery drawing.

Funny guy, that Terry Sobo, a real prankster. So when I asked him what white-hot, stupid-fast Nor-Tech was headed for the Lake of the Ozarks Shootout August 28-29, and he said “our new 39-foot center console,” I thought he was joking.

Turns out he wasn’t.

“We’re definitely taking the 39,” said Sobo. “It’s time those people on that dark-water lake see what the ‘ultimate deck boat’ looks like.”

Sobo said he plans on entering the 39-footer, which is powered by triple 300-hp Verado outboard engines and reportedly runs in the low 70-mph  range, in the Shootout.

“I don’t even know if they have a class for center consoles,” he said. “But they have one for pontoon boats, so why not?”