Speed On The Water

By the time you read this, I’ll be on an airplane headed for St. Louis, Mo., which is about two hours and change by car from the Lake of the Ozarks, the site of this weekend’s top-speed Shootout.

OK, so that’s not entirely true. By the time you read this, I’ll be flying to Denver to catch a connecting flight to St. Louis. I live about 25 miles south of San Francisco. This area is serviced by three international airports and every major commercial passenger carrier.

Unfortunately, none of them offer direct service to St. Louis. So I get to turn what should be an easy three-hour flight into something of a seven-hour travel grind—not counting the car ride from St. Louis to the lake—that starts at 5 a.m.

And you know what? I don’t care. (OK, I sort of care as I’ve grown to despise everything about air travel in the past 10 years.) I am lucky. I get to cover what is arguably the greatest event in high-performance boating for Powerboat magazine, as well as speedonthewater.com and boatermouth.com.

I don’t just get to hang out with long-time industry friends. I get to meet and hang out with real go-fast boat enthusiasts, folks who might never own anything beyond a 60-mph 20-footer but truly appreciate exotic creations such as David’s Scott’s Nauti-Marine, a 50-foot Mystic with a couple of 2,000-hp alcohol engines.

And to his unending credit, Scott appreciates them. I’ve seen him spend hours at the docks answering questions from passersby. Same goes for his throttleman, John Tomlinson. Same goes for former Shootout Top Guns Dave Callan and John Cosker. Same goes for all the big names at the event.

Ace photographer Robert Brown is shooting the event for Powerboat, and his photos will support—OK, carry, because we all know that pictures are far better than words—my feature in the next issue of Powerboat. But during the Shootout on Saturday and Sunday, WiFi-allowing I’ll try to post a few updates.

If you see me at the docks—I’ll be wearing a Powerboat shirt of some sort so it should be easy (yeah, right) to spot me—please say hello and introduce yourself. And if you want me to take a look at your ride, whether it’s a 40-foot Skater cat that tops 160 mph or a 20-foot Baja that runs 60 mph, I’ll be happy to check it out. Because while the boats put on the show, there is no show without you. All of you.

The guys in the show get that and, trust me, I get it too.

On August 4, I reported on the development Sterling Performance’s new 1,700-hp turbocharged engine. At that time, the engine was headed for dynamometer testing. Company principal Mike D’Anniballe told me he hoped to have the engines ready to debut in Bob Bull’s new 48-foot-long Marine Technology, Inc., racing catamaran at the 2010 Super Boat International Key West World Championships in November.

Unfortunately that won’t happen, according to D’Anniballe.

“We were scheduled to run in Key West, but I won’t have two sets of engines ready in time,” D’Anniballe told me early this morning. “We just ran out of time, so he (Bob Bull) is going to run our supercharged 1,500s.

“We should have the 1,700s ready by Christmas, and he’ll run them after the Key West Worlds,” he added.

D’Anniballe said that he was pleased with the results from the dyno testing.

“It went well—me made 1,690 hp and went through like ten drums of fuel,” he said. “Now we just have to tear the motors apart to evaluate them.”

Regardless of what you think of “West Coast custom” catamarans, no company builds them better than Dave’s Custom Boats in El Cajon, Calif. DCB’s workmanship and attention to detail in construction not only lead the genre, they rival that of any custom performance-boat builder east of the Mississippi.

That is, to borrow from the movie “Pulp Fiction,” a bold statement for sure. But it’s one I make based on experience with a wide variety product. As the guy with the second best job in the world as editor at large for Powerboat magazine—Jennifer Aniston’s personal sunscreen technician is job No. 1—I get to log hours in some of the most amazing high-performance pleasure boats on the planet. And DCB consistently blows me away.

But don’t take my word for it. If you happen to be strolling the docks at Captain Ron’s during the Lake of the Ozarks Shootout August 28-30 check out the DCB M-35 catamaran with Mercury Racing 1025EFI engines that will be on display.

“We’re going there to check it out and show our product—we’ve heard it’s just such a great event,” Dave Hemmingson, DCB’s principal, told me earlier today. “And from what I understand, it’s going to be a really big deal this year.”

Hemmingson said he’s not planning to enter the cat in the speed runs.

“But you never know,” he added. “We may be there, watch a little bit and decide we want to run.”

Last week I caught up with Mike Fiore of Outerlimits on the Bristol, R.I., custom V-bottom and catamaran builder’s in-house engine program. Near the end of our discussion, Fiore mentioned that he was in the final stages of sea trials for the company’s first quad-diesel-engine SV-52—four 560-hp Fiat Powertrain mills fill the engine compartment. The all-carbon, canopied 52-footer, which rides on a five-step hull and will be used for endurance racing by an overseas buyer, captured a lot of attention.

So about an hour ago I spoke with Fiore to learn more about the 15,000-pound boat. Here’s what he had to say:

In addition to four Fiat Powertrain diesel engines, your new 52-footer has four Arneson ASD drives with quick-change gears and Hering 35-inch-pitch propellers. How has the performance been to date in your sea trials?

Amazing. It’s a big freight train with a top speed of over 112 mph, and it’s very smooth.

How’s the fuel consumption?

Pretty modest, actually. At 90 mph, it gets 1.5 mile per gallon. So with its 500-gallon fuel tank that means it has a range of 700 miles at 90 mph. At 100 mph, it gets 1.2 miles per gallon, which is still pretty good.

Have you had the boat in rough water?

Yeah, and as I said it’s a freight train. It motors along effortlessly. It’s like sitting—it’s a five-place sit-down boat—in your living room. It’s going to be a really good endurance racer. And it handles flat and smooth. It doesn’t do anything wrong. The four propellers in the water work well. The setup is perfect.

This was your first quad-diesel-engine installation. What was that like?

(Laughs) It was a nightmare. It was a packaging nightmare. The forward two engines literally are under the back seats. The engine compartment has, like, a sea strainer “farm.” There’s four of everything in there, and it’s tight. Good thing the engines are diesels—they tend to last awhile (laughs again).