Miami Herald

July 4, 1983

REAGAN'S RECORD ATTEMPT ENDS IN SPUTTERING FAILURE

ERIC SHARP- Herald Boating Writer

In the end, the winner was implacable old Mother Ocean.

Michael Reagan's effort to set a new speedboat record from Miami to New York City ended, out of gas and broke down, Sunday near Savannah, Ga., only 400 miles into the 1,257-mile run.

Reagan's wife Colleen, who was waiting for her husband in New York, said the boat apparently ran out of gas 22 miles short of the refueling boat. Reagan and his crew also were running with one of the three motors out and the radar malfunctioning. The refueling boat eventually found Reagan, but Reagan decided to have his racer towed into Beufort, S.C.

While it was small consolation, he did get 275 miles farther than Miami Beach eye surgeon Bob Magoon, who was knocked out of the two-boat race only 125 miles and two hours after leaving Miami's Government Cut Saturday evening in an effort to keep Reagan from seizing the record Magoon set nine years ago.

A fuel starvation problem caused by faulty fuel tank vents did in Magoon's hopes.

Magoon, 47, said he planned to try another Miami-New York run next Friday if the weather was good and the boat's mechanical ailments proved to be as simple to repair as he expects.

Magoon was sidelined about 25 miles north of Fort Pierce, Fla. While he was slowly nursing his crippled boat back south, Reagan shot by him a few miles to seaward, heading north toward a planned stop to refuel from a 72-foot shrimp boat waiting in the Atlantic off the Georgia coast.

"We could only do about 55 miles an hour when we started, but I figured that was because we were so heavily loaded," said Magoon, who took five hours to hobble back to Miami. "But we kept going slower and slower, even though we were getting lighter as we used up fuel. And we found a fuel bladder we had up forward had burst and dumped about 100 gallons of diesel into the boat.

"I finally decided to turn around, and I'm glad we did. Our speed dropped to about 20 miles per hour, everybody was getting nauseous from the diesel fumes, and it was obvious we weren't going to set a record."

He said it should only take a few days to install effective tank vents and replace fuel pumps damaged by the problem.

The crews of both boats had decided to make the record attempt whenever the weather was most favorable between June 30 and July 3. The weather forecast for Saturday night and Sunday was almost perfect, the wind southerly and easterly at 10 knots or less and the sea mostly under than two feet all the way up the Eastern Seaboard.

Reagan's 38-foot Wellcraft Scarab, powered by three huge Evinrude outboards turning 400 horsepower each, averaged about 57 m.p.h. to the first refueling stop, a bit slower than he had hoped, yet still ahead of record time. But a team spokesman said that when Reagan pulled up to the shrimper, it was obvious his boat had a serious mechanical problem that was not going to be repaired quickly. Reagan quit at 10:30 a.m. when it was determined that the boat could not be repaired in time to break the record and win the Charles Chapman Trophy put up by Motor Boating and Sailing Magazine.

For Magoon, driving a specially-designed, 45-foot Cigarette powered by twin 1,000-horsepower diesels, his breakdown came less than a year after last summer's Miami-New York run ended at the halfway mark with the failure of a $1.59 bearing.

Although he had trouble getting the engines to start, Reagan was hitting about 70 m.p.h. when he roared out of Government Cut at 11:59 p.m. Saturday, some five hours after the official timer clocked Magoon across the same starting line.

The breakdown also meant the end of the trip for a sponsor- supplied helicopter carrying a pilot, doctor and two scuba divers, who provided a safety cover and navigational assistance, and for 14 Secret Service agents aboard a government- supplied U.S. Coast Guard C-130 long-range search and rescue aircraft that was to hover over Reagan like a guardian angel all the way.

Reagan, a 38-year-old Los Angeles promoter and the President's eldest son, was making the run as a fundraiser for the New York State Statue of Liberty Commission, one of the groups trying to raise money to refurbish the statue.

Magoon did not seek pledges but ran his boat under the auspices of the federal Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Centennial Commission, the group appointed by Reagan's father to raise $230 million in subscriptions that will be used to renovate the national monument before the statue's 100th anniversary in 1986.