RACE SITES:
June 17 & 18 Dayton, Ohio Jack Hines (937) 898-0562 or nhines8891@aol.com
July 29 & 30 Buffalo, NY: Hydromania Vintage is on the schedule. Invitation only. Contact Paul Reid 716-691-8351
Aug. 17 - 20 Clayton, NY: Antique Raceboat Regatta 2000. You need to make your reservations now. 150+ Vintage Race boats will be there. Static displays and flybys. 

RACING MEMORIES BY BILL BOYES SR.:
In the spring of 1930, I was going to school and my buddy Mike Snider, had a steady job. Although Mike was six or seven years older, we had common interests: speed boats and fast cars.
 I was single and Mike was divorced with no ties, so together we would go to the Long Beach Marina to watch the boat races. We also like to watch the cars run at the old Ascot Speedway near downtown Los Angles. Mike had a chance to sponsor a racecar and asked me if I would like to drive. We found a good practice straightaway on Inglewood Ave. between Century Blvd and Imperial Highway in Lennox, CA. I drove the car one time down that road. I don’t recall if it was because I was drawing a crowd of onlookers or because I almost lost it near 108th street, but Mike wisely told me that he wasn’t going to sponsor the car because I get killed driving it.
 Smitty Collins and his brothers were plumbers by trade and built a boat very fast boat called Hot Stuff. It had a 4-60 Evinrude engine. At the races nobody could beat him. Mike and I decided we wanted an outfit like that so we went to see Smitty, nicknamed “Pop Collins”. His son was known as “Doc”. Smitty got us a 4-60 engine and agreed to build us a boat just like his Hot Stuff. We were now boat racers, members of the Long Beach Power Boat Club, and full-fledged members of APBA.
 The Collins Boat Shop was located on East Florence near the corner of Avalon Blvd in Los Angles. Smitty gave me a job part-time at .25 cents per hour which gave me a chance to work on our boat while it was under construction.
 Collins boats at that period of time were constructed with oak frames bolted together with galvanized carriage bolts, the battens were spruce screwed to the frames with galvanized screws. The planking was ¼” mahogany screwed to the frames. The boat was 14 ft. long with high gunnels. The bottom was flat to about midship.
 A comment about “non trip chines”: I don’t know who came up with that type of a bottom for an outboard runabout, but I do remember when we built a marathon boat for Smitty to race on the Hudson River from Albany to New York City. We had the boat in the jig; bottom up and starting to plank the bottom when Smitty came by with a hand saw, looked at the flat bottom and sawed the corners off each side to midship. He said plank the bottom like that, which we did.
The steering wheel for our boat came from a wrecked LaSalle roadster and was my pride and joy. It was very large with aluminum spokes. The rim was wood and a beauty. I polished and varnished it to a high gloss. It was very slippery so I had to wrap cord around it at each spoke. All our races were 50 laps and/or 50 miles; we needed a large capacity gas tank. The tank on the wrecked LaSalle had a brass screw cap so we got the tank and installed it between the cockpits. The throttle lever with a black knob on top and the pump to pressurize the gas tank came from a wrecked Jenny airplane. My dad put the finish on the boat. He came up with a stain that gave the mahogany a green cast. It really was a beautiful looking race boat. The bottom was painted black and we rubbed powered graphite in it to make it slick (messy!).
 The steering bar was made in a blacksmith’s shop and beat out by hand using a coal forge. The steering barrel I made in school out of an oak block. The steering cable was sash cord and had to continually tighten it up. The 4-60 Evinrude engine had straight stacks six inches long. When we started the engine I am sure you could hear it running in downtown Long Beach.
 Our trailer was made out of a front end of a car we found in a wrecking yard. We got wheels, tires, springs and all. We locked and bolted the wheels parallel, mounted 2 x 10s on edge and bolted them to the spring shackles. The 2 x10s were bolted together at the front end. The blacksmith shop made an S shaped strap for the trailer and a strap for our car. We used a ½”bolt for the pin. No safety chain (I guess we didn’t think about it). No license and no running lights. We never had a problem with the trailer.
 We were considered “unlimited racing” and we were the “main event.” No requirements on dress, we wore white duck pants and sweatshirts with cloth helmets. I don’t know why except the helmets made us look like race drivers. Life vests were by choice. We started out with two surplus cork jackets we found in a maritime store in San Pedro. The jackets were extremely bulky but it did help our ribs when we got knocked around in the cockpit in rough water. We later found two Kapok vests, one with a collar and one without. We flipped for the one with the collar (I won).
 The only requirement by APBA that I remember was the outfit had to weigh a minimum of 650 lbs. To meet the weight, we bolted in lead weights along with the biggest 6-volt truck battery we could find.
 Our boat was very fast and a dream on the straight-aways, but difficult on the one buoy turns. 
 All of our starts were flagged like Indy cars. No jumping the gun, all coming up to the starting line - fairly easy. Eight or ten boats headed for that first turn buoy, digging holes and their flat bottoms sliding all over the turn. Because of this, I took the turn wide, stayed on plane, slid around wide open, and came out in front. Then trouble came. The gasoline line from the tank to the engine was copper and it would sometimes leak at the fittings. Prior to the race, I found a line with a metal web cover so we installed it. We didn’t have a gauge on the tank, and as we were out in front we got excited and kept pumping air into the tank, thinking we might stall for lack of fuel to the engine. We had a large bell shaped intake on the carburetor. Passing a slower boat the engine gulped some water, backfired and we were engulfed with fire. I shut down the engine. We were out of the race for several laps. We had over pressurized the tank and the new fuel line was spraying raw gas all over the rear cockpit. I unscrewed the gas cap and this stopped the gas from spraying. We got the fire out and the engine restarted. We came in third place. I still have the cup we won that day.
 One time while racing in Marine Stadium in Long Beach and while Mike was driving we came into the beach after the race and the engine did not slow down. The piano wire throttle cable broke at the throttle lever and as I was in the rear as the mechanic I stuffed a rag into the carburetor intake and stalled the engine. We slid up on the sand and scratched the bottom of the boat on all the seashells. Except for Lake Elsinore, our entire racing was in salt water. Piano wire rusts very easily so we changed the throttle cable quite often after that near accident.
 The last time we raced with the 4-60 engine and the only time we flipped in three years of racing was at Cabrillo Beach in the Examiner sponsored Hearst Regatta. A high wind was blowing and we should have canceled the race. Mike made the decision to go out and he drove. We destroyed our 4-60 engine in the flip.
 During that time boats were named and friends decided we should call ours “Holy Moses!” It was an expression commonly in use then, i.e., “Holy Moses, did you see that?” Mike always said our bad luck was because of the boat’s name but we never did change it. The boat was sold after Mike was transferred out of state and I got married. I soon had a full time job making .35 cents an hour as an aircraft mechanic. 
For the next 19 years I was out of racing, until 1953, when my son who was 12 years old became interested in the sport. We ran a DeSilva marathon boat using a Mercury KG-9 engine. I though this would be safe for a new driver who was only 12 years old.

VINTAGE HOT BOAT OF THE MONTH:  
HOLY MOSES, C-485 Bill Boyes and Mike Snider racing at Long Beach Marine Stadium in 1930. Note the oil wells and the old cars in the background on the beach.
©2000 Tom D'Eath