Tastin’ N Racin’ review -

Not our best weekend!

Friday night:

The boat is in the pits, we’ve had a long three days getting here. The engine wasn’t ready until Wednesday evening and we have barely gotten the systems reinstalled. Time to find out what it’s like on the water. See you Saturday, 7am.

Saturday night:

We didn’t get off to a great start – to say the least. The boat wouldn’t fire so we swapped out the MSD but in the process managed to get grease all over the windshield. By the time the new MSD was in and we were timing the engine the crane was overhead… time to go. I left the pits for Heat 1 and couldn’t see ten feet. Water was literally sticking to the windshield and totally obscuring my view. Dean talked me (blind) around the course and back to the pits. We’ll get ready for Heat 2.

Things didn’t improve. As the boat was being lifted we noted that the escape hatch was not closed. The crew closed the hatch with the boat in the air – mistake. There is a big difference with this hatch between “closed” and “sealed”. By the time I got to the dock the cockpit already had nine inches of water inside, we won’t be running today.

Sunday night:

Our woes continued. We got to the pits early, went through the checklist twice to make certain all the i’s were dotted and t’s were crossed. We felt good, we felt ready, we headed out for Heat 3. The boat took off well and started to pick up speed – but wait we can’t get over 4800 rpm. Something is not right, the boat starts backing down and we have to shut down when we reach 3000 rpm and are spraying so much water that I can’t see through.

A new engine, many hundreds of hours putting new hydro shoes, air dams and paint on the boat but in the end we felt no love. Turns out that we cracked one of the spark plugs and that caused the problems building rpm. We’ll regroup and set our sights on Valleyfield.