Alaskan Boating in Springtime...

[arcticracer]

NOT!!!!! It will be awhile.

[smittythewelder]

Funny, Dale. Has the ice gone out yet?

You were good enough to jog memories about your dad, a while back. How about an essay on Yukon River racing history? Back when your dad was showing his transom to the CU/DU guys here, Seattle Outboard had a great volunteer race helper named Clyde Ambacher. IIRC, his brother Paul, before becoming a mechanic for Pacific Northern Airlines in Seattle, had won that race with a B Stock Hydro some time in the Fifties. I suppose that by now, instead of using outboard hydros and runabouts, the racers have switched to tunnel boats or bass boats or air boats or something. I do know that fifteen or twenty years ago there was at least one fellow in Fairbanks, last name of Lawrence, I think, who had an early 350cc Yamato on a hydro. I mentioned his name to somebody, and they thought they had hear that he'd passed away, despite being a young man.

Does anyone race Stock or Mod or PRO boats up there now? And if anyone from the Anchorage area reads this, I'd like to hear their answer to the same question.

[arcticracer]

Hi Smitty,

I'm curious, refresh my memory about my Dad's transom. Was it what Joe called a "vacuum relief" transom, with the hollow core and vents? Wonder if that really helped...

I could post a little Yukon 800 history stuff, I think we are coming up on the 50th anniversary of the race. I have been here for 25 years. It took me until my second or third summer before I heard about the Fairbanks Outboard Association, and when I heard they had an active racing schedule through the summer, I was there! I was beyond fascinated, the boats seem to defy physics with the speed they go.

I started chatting with some of the racers, going to all of the races. I am also into Ham Radio, and it turns out that the Arctic Amateur Radio Club (which I was in) handled volunteer communications for the 800. The hams spread out along the river at 6 to 8 REMOTE checkpoints, and would set up HF and VHF portable radio setups.

That first year I helped out, I think was 88, I took my radio stuff (everything would fit into a small suitcase) and jumped in a boat with one of the former racers and headed to a place called Old Minto about 30 miles downriver from Nenana which is about 85 river miles from here.

It had been raining hard for many days, which fills the Tanana with "drift", what the locals call all the sticks, logs, trees, and garbage in the water. It was really thick. I had a very wet but fun time for 2 days helping with the excitement, and I was hooked.

Nowadays the Hams aren't involved as most villages have cell phones now, sat phones, etc. I spent a lot of years working up and down the river doing checkpoints, even got my own 20' riverboat. Some years I would fly down and get dropped off, and some I would ride with my Buddy Scott who was a one time winner of the race.

What was once a busy racing schedule in the old days is now down to 3 or 4 races and it is harder and harder to field a large group of boats. It is like what is going on in some other types of boat racing, trying to keep the tradition and sport alive. I am just a spectator now.

There is no other boat racing in Alaska that I know of, but there used to be a pretty active bunch of stock and mod racing, we're talking 50's, 60's. The Fairbanks area had a lot of pond racing, they even ran on the Tanana. I know of a guy in Fairbanks from the Jackovich family (don't remember his first name) that had a hydro and Yamato, I used to see it running around once in awhile. I talked to him one time, there may have been others, it was a Laydown. I'll ask around about the name Lawrence.

[Ron Hill]

Cliff Bedford f San Diego "Invented" the vented transom. We used to race and test at the San Diego Flood Control Channel. It was long and pretty narrow. Every afternoon the sea breeze came up and the Flood Control Channel would get pretty rough, but the last 200 yards, because the sand bar made the channel narrow would always bee smooth aws glass as it wasn't much wider than a four lane highway.

Everyone would always make a "BONZAI" run that last 200 yards....Cliff noticed a "VORTEX" behind every boat as they came strait at the pits. The smoke from the engine would curl around behind the boat.

Cliff dropped the decks at the rear of his hydros to lessen the "VORTEX", which gave the boat speed. Cliff Bedford had build some fast boats in his life, one being the "TIGER" that Ronnie Rima won the Colorado River Marathon with, several times, until he sold it to Jimmy Dawe.

Cliff decide to "VENT" his hydro's transom. Without GPS's and computers, he figured, with a Keller, that he gained speed. Cliff later "Vented" his A Runabout which was th fastest boat on the west coast, he then gave the boat to Glen Chambers of Needles.

Craig Selvidge saw these "vented transoms" when he came to the Golden Shores Winternationals.

At the 1973 Nationals, I think every A Hydro was Hedlund. At the 1974 Dayton Nationals, there were 11 Hedlunds and one Selvidge. The Craig Craft was driven be Steve DeFeo, and he won by more that 1/4 a lap.

The winter of 1974, I called DeFeo and asked, "How do you win a Nationals by 1/4 a lap?" He answered, "Craig Craft Boats."

Craig admitted to me h copied "CLIFF BEDFORD'S" vented transom.

If a Castigneto Boat had a "Vented" transom, I hav no idea where it came from.

[arcticracer]

I don't recall the Castegnato having a vented transom, I could be wrong. I'm wondering if Smitty is talking about Joe Price's boats, even the J's had the vented transoms this was around 1968. Smitty?

With the snow melted, I'm going to retreive a bunch of old 2 blade props out of the 5th wheel that I brought back from Oregon after my Dad passed, I guess there are 18 or so. They sat on the wall in the garage all those years after quitting racing following Beloit in 1970.

There are some Joe Price props, including a couple of J wheels very similar to what we used. 1 Lockhart J prop, that we had to try to keep up with Janis Lee. It didn't work for us. Some others are just old junk, I'll post some pics in the Props area maybe someone will get a kick out of them.

[smittythewelder]

I meant "showing his transom" metaphorically, meaning your dad was out in front of the pack.

Selvidge had the first vented transom I saw up here, and I doubt Castagneto had them, but check with the older East Coast fellows.

On looking at it, I expressed some mild skepticism to Craig that enough air could be pulled rapidly through that small, circuitous high-drag set of passages to materially lessen the turbulent area behind the boat (and I still am skeptical). As I recall it, Craig quietly indicated that it was as much a sales tool as anything. But I might remember that wrong, and the thing to do would be check with Craig now.

Sorry to hear the Fairbanks racing scene is on the decline. It happens all over. There used to be some outboard racing in British Columbia in the old days, and I drove up to a nice little combined outboard/inboard race on Lac La Hache, near Hundred Mile House in 1965. Even as a novice, with my old bad-handling slug of a homebuilt hydro, I think I could have beat those Canadian guys with their popping 20H's on little old Swifts. My luck, I went out to test before the course was set up, got into a bunch of floating grassy stuff, and ground up my 16:21 gears. I had a spare 1:1 gearcase, but the only prop I had was an old OJ sized for C Stock. Being new and dumb, I didn't know to jack the motor way up to give it some kind of chance to spin up that oversize prop, and the one photo I have shows that I have the motor sitting right on the transom, no shims. The engine just bogged, so I sat out the races. To get to the point of this story, a few years later I ran into Phil Schaffer, who lived in the area and had driven one of the old Swifts that day. I asked him if they were still racing our outboards in B.C., and he shook his head scornfully and said, "No! All they ever do now is drink".

[Bill Van Steenwyk]

Some years ago when Gene East worked for Quincy Welding, he made at least one and possibly several trips to Alaska to work with an Indian tribe there who raced a long dugout looking type canoe. I think there was competition between one specific Indian tribe and at least one, and possibly several others. Don't remember now what type engines they were using, but evidently they were not fast enough for the job versus the other competition, so Gene was put on the project.

Gene was asked (or told) by Christner to take some type Quincy Flathead and go up there and work with the members of this particular tribe and get them running good, and winning, with the Quincy brand of engine.

I will PM Gene about this thread and see if he can add more to the story, as when I heard it the first time years ago it sounded like a real adventure. I seem to remember he put something on BRF about it several years ago but I can't find it now.

[arcticracer]

Sorry Smitty, now I get it.... Dad did run pretty fast but he never had success at Nationals those classes were so competetive! He was close to Ron's DU Kilo record when it was 70 and change but never did crack it.

That Canoe racing sounds similar to the Quinalt guys in Washington, I never heard about Alaskan canoe racing sounds like maybe it would have been down in Southeast somewhere?

[smittythewelder]

In the mid-Sixties the Quinaults, a big tribe out on the coast, used to bring what we then called their "indian war-canoes" to Seattle Outboard races, running them as a class, a nice bit of exotic variety and very popular with everybody. I think they were then using Mk20s or Mk25s with open pipes but fishing motor lower units. The boats were long narrow dugouts but with a wide section of plywood under the last two or three feet of the bottom as a planing surface. The handling was said to be as wierd as you would expect from looking at them. Gene Laes, a Bremerton area BSH and BOH driver, and a shop teacher, used to give the canoe racers some help with their engines. Rick Montoya more recently actually went out to the coast and raced war-canoes a few times, and has some good stories if he shows up here.

Dale, I sure thought your dad had a record or two . . . .

[arcticracer]

He did have some records, from Lawrence Lake in CU and DU both set the same year. I think he set one of the records twice, different years. He had them certified by the UIM and I have the certificates. Tom Scheidt broke one of them, I want to say CU. Not sure on the other the old record books will have it.

I read Ric's article on the Canoe racing on the SOA website, I wish I could have seen those boats run. They must have been a real handful!

[Ron Hill]

I too wondered about the advantage of the vented transoms. I often felt that they might even cause wind resistance by squeezing air through those small vents.

I do know this, vented transom boats didn't have a black oil film on them and all my boats did.

I was never quite sure how they got ruled out, but I guess people worried that the transom could rot and no one would see the rot, and cause an accident...

[arcticracer]

OK, so the vented transoms got outlawed.... Interesting.

Smitty, picked up the engraved plate things that were on the trophies, or plaques from Lawrence Lake.

APBA World Record
TBRA Lawrence Lake
CU 53.571
Dale Powell
9/18/65

APBA World Record
TBRA Lawrence Lake
DU 58.536
Dale Powell
9/18/65

World Record
5 Mile Competition
Dale Powell
CU 55.181
Sept. 66
Lawrence Lake