Word: outboards
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...muffins in the sun. Women in shorts and bare-chested men sweat over engines, hulls and brightwork. Strung along the docks here and there, families perch like terns as they munch their sandwiches, while over at the launching ramp, a black-and-white Pontiac with a black-and-white outboard runabout in tow backs tortuously toward the water. Pontiac and runabout have matching upholstery, matching fins, matching wraparound windshields...
...numerically, by far the biggest noise in the boom is made by outboards, which have undergone a revolution of their own in the last ten years. Traditionally, outboards were low-powered, designed with an eye on trolling fishermen. But after World War II, watching the growing trend to family boating, manufacturers began to produce more powerful engines that were designed to drive a boat big enough for the whole family and perky enough to pull a water skier. Since then, outboard motors have become bigger and bigger, now range up to 75 h.p. Equipped with electric starters, a remote steering...
...only about 3,000 five years ago, there are now more than 30,000-and many of them fan out from Phoenix as far as 280 miles to find water. There was scarcely a man-sized boat in Kansas ten years ago; today caravans of autos tow runabouts and outboard cruisers 361 miles from Wichita to Oklahoma's Lake Texoma. The seven-state Tennessee Valley region accommodated fewer than 10,000 boats on 24 TVA-created lakes in 1947; last year the count ran to more than 45,000. Denver had five fulltime boat dealers two years...
...Rods & Greenhorns. The boat boom has brought really only one great menace-the hot-rodder, inboard and outboard, whose feckless abandon yearly kills and maims scores of other boatmen and bathers. New federal and state laws are now tightening requirements on registration and demanding strict adherence to traffic rules. Better still is the growing organization of Coast Guard Auxiliary and Power Squadrons, which give free instruction in seamanship, successfully instill a sense of pride in new boat owners...
...Guard boat chugged out to rescue a man whose brand-new, 36-ft. cruiser had broken down. The rescuers tossed him a towline, whereupon the stalled skipper triumphantly tied it around his waist and hollered "Let's go!" One of the classic invitations to trouble comes for the outboard owner when the engine quits. The owner lunges to the stern to fix it. His added weight brings the transom, already too low in the water, lower still. A five-gallon wave (roughly 50 lbs.) slops aboard. The next wave comes in easier, and the boat swamps...