Among speedonthewater.com’s most popular departments, Image of the Week runs the gamut of the high-performance powerboating world. One week, you might get a big-air shot—always a winner, at least if measured by visitor traffic. The next week, you might see a familiar face in the news. Our choices are dictated by photo quality, content and relevance.

The best photos strike a universal chord. For anyone who’s seen Lake Michigan get nasty, this one surely does (click image to enlarge). Photo courtesy/copyright Pete Boden/Shoot 2 Thrill Pix.

Thanks to the likes of our main man Pete Boden, Halsey Fulton, Jeff Helmkamp, Tom Leigh, Tim Sharkey, Todd Taylor and a few other fine contributing photographers, our Images of the Week typically embody all three elements. Anyone who believes photo quality doesn’t matter online—or that a smart phone photo is “just as good” as an image captured by a pro using top-notch equipment—is delusional.

So I gave myself another tough mission this week: Find the “best” Image of the Week from 2019. That task was made somewhat easier (and harder) in that speedonthewater.com’s Jason Johnson and I are in the final stages of producing the 2019 Speed On The Water Year In Review issue, our fifth annual edition of the unique publication. (That we’ve produced four of these oversized beasts, which started at 132 pages and two years later became a 196-pager, is a fact we still find hard to believe.) For the past few months, we’ve been in hardcore photo-editing mode.

Check out the slideshow above to enjoy the speedonthewater.com Images of the Week from 2019.

As you can see from the gallery above, I had plenty of great photos to choose from. But I kept coming back to the one of a Formula Boats sportboat heading into an absolutely foul Lake Michigan under threatening skies two days before the 2019 Boyne Thunder Poker Run. Titled, “Lake Michigan Strikes Back,” it’s a moment you’ve experienced if you’ve spent any significant time on the water, and one you never forget. It’s a timeless photo from Boden.

And it’s the speedonthewater.com 2019 Image of the Year.

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