They're off! Engines revved to a deafening roar, six mean cats in race to the finish, bucking huge waves and violent gales. Suddenly, Popeye's Chicken & Biscuits careens off a turn and flips belly-up churning water. Then Bud Light screeches into an acrobatic loop, pummeled by the force of Jesse James' wake. With three laps to go, the shoreside crowd goes insane, their cheers competing in volume with the supercharged Mercs and OMCs on the three raceboats that remain. Then there are two, and then, with one lap left, we're down to a single entrant screaming round the course.
"Only the strong survive," announces the judge from on high. True to his name, Wally Tough never flinches. Gently letting up on the throttle, he brings Sea Hag into as smooth a finish as the day's turbulent conditions allow.
Then Tough picks up his boat and carries it, all ten pounds of glo-fuel-powered fiberglass, to his dolly-mounted workbench (actually a mini-boatyard) at the lake's edge. Tough's surrounded by unscathed, "drowned" competitors who slap him good-naturedly on the back. And the racing scene at Amelia Earhart Park in Hialeah, Florida, suddenly shifts back down to reality.
But not for long. Within minutes, all eyes return to the "pit," where the F Offshore Class of Unlimiteds - "Big Boys" measuring some forty to fifty inches in length - are being readied for the final heat. As if intoxicated by blasting .90 horsepower engines and the stink of model airplane fuel, the hardy group of RAMers (members of the Racing Association of Miami) ignore the real thirty-knot gusts and sand-stinging sprays.
Boasting eighty-two members, RAM is the larges and, they claim, most competitive radio-control (r/c) model boat club in the country. Many of the dozens who braved last February's "worst-ever race weather" freely admit to being "fanatics." Representative of the thousands of gas-power modelers who choose to race competitively, they often mirror all the passion and dedication of their full-sized-powerboat-racing counterparts. It is not unusual for r/c racers to devote thirty-plus hours a week and "we stopped counting long ago" dollars to constructing, maintaining, and constantly improving their pint-sized craft.
After Tough lovingly wipes her down, Sea Hag displays as smooth a banana-yellow finish as you'll find on any full-size contender. The retired airline pilot knows the importance of streamlining. "It took just as long to paint her as it did my son-in-law to do a fifty-foot catamaran." However, he notes with a twinkle, "it just didn't take as much paint."
When not out on the lake, Tough mans the counter at Crown Hobbies in West Miami. Crown's owner, Morton Perkis, also practices what he sells. On the day Tough captured the 40 Offshore (.40 hp class) title, Perkis was "pitting" right behind. (To keep track of lightning-fast 40- to 60-plus-MPH action and p to ten racers on a one-third-mile course, modelers have established a buddy system, where in each r/c driver is backed up by a pitman. Pitman sometimes launch the running craft, but their true function is to hold up one finger for each completed lap in the six-lap heat.)
Cool-in-the-pit Perkis looked less than collected when taking his turn in the radio seat. "When I race, I tremble so bad, I thing I'm
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