If you’re in Key West, Florida, from November 2nd through the 9th, be sure to make your way to Truman Waterfront Park to check out the 44th annual Offshore World Championship. Festivities begin with a parade down Duval Street on Sunday, November 2nd at 4:00 pm. Races begin on Wednesday, November 5th, with plenty of practice runs in between. It is quite the spectacle. But I’m getting ahead of myself, because perhaps if it wasn’t for C. Raymond Hunt, there may not be a parade or races at all.
Let’s head north up Route A1A, shall we? Because it was on the morning of April 12, 1960, when Dick Bertram boarded a 30’ powerboat called Moppie.
“The boat’s driver, Sam Griffith, steered her into the smooth waters of Miami’s Government Cut,” explains Stan Grayson in Boat Crazy. “Griffith had Moppie’s two big Lincoln engines burbling away at just above idle speed as he and twenty-two other racers waited for 7 a.m., when the flag would drop and send everyone off in what the Bahamas Tourist Bureau billed as ‘The Most Rugged Ocean Race in the World.’”
Also aboard was yachtsman and writer Carleton Mitchell who writing for Sports Illustrated explained, “Even to one unfamiliar with the type it was obvious she was a wonderful sea boat: 30 feet over-all, built to designs by C. Raymond Hunt of Marblehead in the yard of Richard H. Bertram in Miami by workmen only recently from Havana, Moppie’s underwater form was unusual—V-shaped not only forward but all the way back to the transom.”
When the flag dropped to begin the 185-mile race, “I was slammed back into my chair as Skipper Sam Griffith gunned the engines, the fleet dropped astern and the wake stretched like a wide white road back toward our nearest competitors, a road that grew steadily longer,” wrote Mitchell.
“Nothing could really have prepared Mitchell for the violence of it,” writes Grayson. “He had placed a tube of sunscreen 7’ away and, for the next seven hours, never felt it was safe enough to try and reach it.”
Of course, Moppie won the race, by a lot, pounding through some 10’ seas created by the intersection of the Gulfstream and 30-knot northeast winds. The only other competitor they saw well off their stern was the spray of Jim Wynne’s twenty-three-footer, Aqua Hunter, whose hull was designed by—you guessed it—C. Raymond Hunt.
Action Line: When your life depends on it, you want a good hull and a good plan. The same is true for your retirement life. When you’re ready to talk, let’s talk. Email me at ejsmith@yoursurvivalguy.com.
P.S. Also read Your Survival Guy: Hunt Built a Better Boat and Your Survival Guy: Hunt Built a Better Boat (Part 2).
Originally posted on Your Survival Guy.