Classic racers add pizazz to Seattle's Opening Day boat parade

When Bob Haynes yanks the starting cord — once, sometimes twice, often way more than that — and the spark finally ignites the gas inside his antique Evinrude Speeditwin, it gives a whole new meaning to get-up-and-go.

The silvery, showroom-finish outboard propels Haynes' 1940 racing runabout with all the subtlety of a small nuclear device.

Thing is, the 22.5-horse outboard has no neutral. So when the whip cracks and those ponies dig in and start trying to haul the mail to Dodge — or Duvall, anyway — the bronze prop whips the water of Lake Sammamish, the bow of the 13-foot boat leaps toward the sky and Haynes is kneeling and bobbing on his way down the lake.

There's not much more to say: That boat got up and went.

With growls and pops echoing off willowy marshes and lakeside mini-mansions, the opposed-firing, 30-cubic-inch outboard sounds like a waterborne Harley-Davidson — though maybe an octave higher.

Listen for Haynes' boat, named Phantom, and a sister "ship" on Opening Day of boating season Saturday in Seattle. If you're an Opening Day regular accustomed to queenly waves and white-gloved salutes along Montlake Cut, you better hold on to your corgi. These puppies were born off-leash.

Gleaming glory

"Off to the Races" is the theme for the 2003 Opening Day boat parade, and along with some retired hydroplanes from Seafairs past, stars of the show will include Haynes' boat and a similar runabout, Shazam, both built in the Northwest in the 1940s and veterans of the day when such boats regularly raced on Sammamish Slough and Green Lake.

Too much noise and too many people put an end to those races by the late 1970s. But these race boats survive in gleaming glory, thanks to a few fans of the tradition, and many coats of varnish.

"I've put on 22 or 23 coats right now," Shazam's owner, Fred Bush, said two weeks ago outside his West Seattle workshop, "and I've sanded off about 21!" That's how you build a diamond sheen.

There's not a lot to these boats. Just four feet wide, flat-bottomed with a skeg to help in cornering and a bow like a snub-nosed bullet, they were simply built for speed, weighing only 120 to 170 pounds and powered by a 120-pound outboard. You want light? Shazam's aft decking is 3-millimeter mahogany plywood, less than the thickness of two Lincoln pennies. To compound the featherweight, both runabouts' foredecks aren't wood at all, but aviation cloth glued atop a spruce frame.

The cockpit has room for only one person, who kneels with feet wedged into wooden chocks behind him.

"You don't ride in these boats, it's more like you wear them," observed Barbara Carper of the Antique and Classic Boat Society.

These days, Haynes doesn't run his boat anywhere near the patella-pummeling 60 mph that it can do with the 40-horse Mercury outboard that he sometimes subs for the Speeditwin. He's trying to preserve what he believes is the last boat afloat of the 25 or so of its class designed and built by Charles Shirley of Lafayette, Ore.

The boats were never meant to last this long, said Bush, whose boat was built in the late '40s by another Oregonian, named McDonald, who built about six boats based on Shirley's design. In the past three months, Bush has spent some 200 hours completely replacing Shazam's hull and decking, plus some cracked ribs in its bow.

"The boats were only made to race three or four seasons, then they burned them," he said.

'He'll buy anything shiny'

That 60 mph might not impress Seattle hydroplane fans accustomed to 100-mph-plus "thunderboats," but it's all relative to size.

Compared with a hydro, "These are a little trickier to learn; they don't have the training wheels," Haynes said, joking about the hydroplane's outer sponsons.

In the 1940s, the Phantom-style boats with outboards like the Evinrude held international speed records for "C Service" class.

Haynes, 63, of Renton, a business development specialist for Cooper Wiring Devices, came to boat racing from an earlier interest in desert motorcycle racing. He bought Phantom in 1985.

Bush, 57, is a semi-retired sign artist whose specialty has been emblazoning names on boats all over Puget Sound. He is an expert in applying gold leaf like that on Shazam (which until recently was named Thunderbolt). Photos of past boat projects and auto restorations plaster the wall of his workshop. A restored 1964 Cadillac fills his garage.

"Like my wife says, 'He'll buy anything if it's shiny!' " Bush said with a small grin.

These racing boats are shiny right down to their three-spoke steering wheels, wrapped by a steering cable that feeds back through burnished nickel-zinc eyelets to a block on each side, connected by heavy springs to gleaming metal arms on either side of the engine. Elegant in their simplicity, down to the polished "dead-man's throttle" that stops the engine if the driver is tossed overboard, an important consideration in boats that spend as much time in the air as in the water.

Fred Bush says he also wears a safety tether attached to a kill switch, to ensure that the boat doesn't keep zooming along without him. For observers at Saturday's Opening Day parade, that might offer some comfort.

Bush quotes his boat's previous owner: "You may not care, but the people on the beach will appreciate it!"

Brian J. Cantwell: 206-748-5724 or bcantwell@seattletimes.com