Quote:
Originally Posted by seeroy
Hi Richie - That cat very well may have been a Formula hull to begin with. When Ralph and I got there it was just a blank hull sitting in the MEMCO shop. Also, I think Mr K provided Mabry with a mold that had been acquired from Aronow. The mold was in the shop and I believe it was used to produce all of the MEMCO hulls that we ran. Interestingly, one of the original wooden Switzer Wing boats was also in that shop. The thing that really blew me away was that we were actually working with the legendary Ted Jones. He recounted alot of good stories to us. Indeed Ray Dowling did ride with me in the attached MEMCO pictures. This was the 1968 Gateway Marathon from West Palm Beach to Freeport and back. Monster water in the Gulfstream that day! As you will remember Ray was rather round and I was skinny, therefore I felt comfortable that if we ended up in the water, the sharks would eat him first and leave me alone  . As you can tell by the pics we did alot of "flying" that day. Those were the days of real Offshore and you will notice in the second picture that my right hand is on the steering wheel and MY left hand is on the throttles. Mabry took these pics from light airplane and afterwards told me I should have used more afterplane and put water in the nose ballast tank. Wellllll...a couple days prior Wayne Vickers had tripped and stuffed an identical setup and literally broken the nose off of the boat while practicing with afterplanes and ballast...soooo...I was not about to do the same thing in those monster seas. There were times while quartering in the troughs that I was looking up at breaking crests that I estimated at 15'!!! Actually, I think I did pretty well as I finished 2nd outboard close behind John Stenbeck and (I think) 3rd or 4th overall. I do remember being amazed to see the smoke stacks near the Fort Worth Inlet arise from the water dead ahead after ziz-zagging through the closely spaced chasms in the Stream. The blue Gateway patch in the picture is from 1966. That's the one were I rode with Gene Berg and he lost a bunch of teeth and fractured a kneecap. That's a good story that I posted over on Scream and Fly. Maybe I should copy and post some of those stories from there to here....WOW! those old days were fun for all of us. I went on to do other things that were also fun and exciting, but I have always looked back on the "Kiekhafer Navy" days as an amazing era. Sometimes I think back and say to myself. "WOW! Did I actually DO that?" The answer is always....YES! |
Steve: I think what we have to say is how were we able to live through some of those days. Sometime back in a Carl Kiekhaefer thread, I wrote about how Carl gave so many of us young guys the opportunity to race. Most of us had hardly ever been in a race boat much less being assigned our own race boat, and being sent into the Lion`s den ( Tongue of the Ocean and Gulf stream ) at speeds mostly over our heads. Says a lot for the guy, he loved his race guys, he was surely the Vince Lombardi of my life, I will forever be beholding to him, he was the true champion maker. I know he has given me his hand to live through some of my more recent accidents, I have survived. There are not to many of us left. to tell the stories, so I guess it`s up to us, and Brownie.
Best Regards. Richie 7XCHAMP
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