Miami Herald

April 3, 1983

WINNING DRIVER HAD THAT SINKING FEELING

ERIC SHARP - Herald Boating Writer

World offshore powerboat champion Tony Garcia says his season-opening victory at New Orleans last Sunday wasn't half as nerve-wracking as the race that began after he crossed the finish line -- the dash to reach the crane before his boat sank from under him.

"That was exciting. We had to do it the hard way," Garcia said with a laugh, recalling how he and throttleman Sammy James of LaBelle, Fla., watched in dismay as water poured into their Michelob Light catamaran when they slowed down to head for the race committee boat to pick up the traditional checkered flag.

A four-foot-square hole had been punched in the underside of the wing deck near the transom when the 38-foot cat leaped into the air at about 70 miles an hour and slammed down hard on a short breaking wave on Lake Ponchartrain, a quarter-mile short of the finish of the Popeyes Fried Chicken Offshore Grand Prix.

When the boat touched down, it bounced from stern to nose and submarined along for a few yards before bursting back out through the surface "like a Polaris missile" with a 100-foot- high fan of spray hanging behind it.

In a telephone interview from Honolulu, Garcia, a San Francisco stockbroker, said, "The wave that came on board when the nose dived under hit Sammy on the side of the helmet and knocked him into the back of his cockpit, but I saw it coming and got my head down and it sort of went right over me. Neither one of us was hurt.

"We didn't know we had a hole in the boat. We gunned it when we saw all that water coming in, but by that time it was too late. As we ran forward, the water just poured in by the hundreds of gallons. By the time we got to the crane and got the slings under it, the water was about up to the sparkplugs on the engines."

The first race of the Offshore Power Boat circuit last Sunday was a real boat killer. A lot of people running new gear found it wasn't quite ready yet. Only two of the nine entrants finished in the biggest and fastest class, Offshore I. Flap- Jack, driven by Chicago pancake magnate Howard Quam, was a poor second to Michelob Light. Interestingly, both Class I finishers were powered by Arneson surface-effect drives.

It was a tight race for the first 100 miles, with Michelob Light and Al Copeland's new Popeyes cat trading the lead as they averaged about 92 miles per hour around the 20-mile circuit. Once Popeyes broke down, Garcia and James throttled back to a sedate 72-m.p.h. average and posted an 81-m.p.h. pace for the 186-mile event.

The fastest average speed was the 81.5 by Dan Weinstein of Fort Lauderdale in his 38-foot Offshore II Cougar cat, Power Play, over the 103-mile course run by the four smaller classes.

Sheer Terror, a 30-foot Flight Marine catamaran driven by Bob Sheer of Fort Lauderdale, finished first in Offshore III. Black Duck, a 30-foot Shadow Cat driven by national champion Pete Aitken of South Norwalk, Conn., opened its season with an Offshore IV victory, and rookie Kevin Fischer of Metairie, La., was the winner and only finisher in Offshore V, piloting It's Quick, his Maelstrom 29 vee-hull, over the line with one of its two engines shut down.

Only two Offshore I vee-hulls showed up for this race, and they were soon left behind by most of the seven catamarans.

Garcia and Copeland are awaiting delivery of 51-foot catamarans from Cougar Marine of England. Garcia's boat is built of wood and powered by four 454-cubic-inch gasoline engines. Copeland's boat is built of aluminum. It, too, has quadruple 454s.

Top speed for existing offshore power cats is about 115 m.p.h. on a flat sea. The new superboats should do 125 to 130 in mild conditions, and the builders hope they will continue to scream along at 90 in six- to eight-foot seas where the vee- hulls, the traditional rough-water boats, are forced to run 10 m.p.h. slower.

The two superboats should arrive in the United States at the end of this month, but they won't appear in a race for some time. Garcia says he wants his boat thoroughly wrung out in tests before it sees any competition.

And Garcia also has the problem of winning the 1983 U.S. offshore title for sponsor Bernie Little, the driving force behind the Michelob Light and Miss Budweiser racing teams and a man who wants to see his high-speed waterborne beer billboards first across the finish line.

The rules say you can change boats during the season, but the new boat must be the same type as the old one.

By the time the 51-footer is ready to race, probably around August, Garcia will have run five or six of the eight races in the present boat. Switching to a new boat means he will have to begin building national points all over again.

"There are a couple of strategies we're considering," he says. "The first, of course, is to try to build such a lead in points in this boat that we don't have to worry about the others. If we get far enough ahead of everybody, we will have some breathing room and can put the new boat in some races.

"But if the level of competition continues the way it did in the first race, we can't count on that. Al Copeland was just as fast as we were."