Originally Posted by
Top Banana
The boat in # 10 is a MEMCO....actually it was Carl Kiekhaefer that owned the molds (From Magnum) and sold them to........Mabry Edwards, so that he could make a special run of boats just for Kiekhaefer to race with his Lake X specials....hence the name on the stern of the boat MEMCO, for Mabry Edwards Manufacturing Company.
The other guy in this # 10 photo was Dale Thayer, another of Carl's guys and very talented racer. Here is a photo below of Dale Thayer and Odell Lewis at the Miss America race in Atlantic City NJ in 1967. Odell & Dale was supposed to be driving the turbine boat, but Carl K pulled it at the last minute for a display at a factory open house in Fond du Lac.
So the boys took this boat and competed with it instead....back then there were no prima donnas, these guys just wanted to race and would race anything, anywhere. Anyway, this is a 19 foot Sea Craft with a nose extension added to meet regulations (Sorry, Reggie the nose extension beat you by a couple of decades)
The swells were big from a passing storm and Odell had it figured, that if they ran wide open, they could make every other swell. What that means is they would run up the first wave wide open and fly over the second while riding down it's back. They never had to slow down.....until, yup a rogue wave gave us the first ever, "Stuff" of a deep V in an open ocean race. It knocked one engine out and the other was sputtering, while the boat took on the big amount of water from the stuff.
The boat started filling with water over the transom and Dale got up on the deck and pushed the throttles down and moved the boat enough to bail some water over the transom. Odell put on the bilge pumps and both began bailing with their helmets. A rescue boat came over to help and was amazed that they waved him off as they wanted to finish the race.
The got the one engine that was out running again and the other cleared and off they went. Odell had made a bet before the race with Johnny Bakos that they would beat him to the finish line....and he didn't want to lose the bet.
A magic time when giants raced.
This photo has never been published anywhere before, even Crouse's book doesn't have it....a nice start for Serious.