By JOSEPH NORRIS
SoMdNews.com
Back when I was a fledgling reporter just beginning to get my feet wet as a sports editor for the Enterprise newspaper in 1973, I used to cover the power boat races which in the early 1970s were just beginning to peter out after many successful decades.
I was a young kid barely out of high school and my knowledge of certain sports was fairly limited. I had to learn the basic rules of soccer, lacrosse and high school wrestling during a year of initiation. Boat races, at least, were straightforward. I usually used the opportunity to take “cool” pictures of boats with water spraying out behind them as they passed by. On one such excursion down in Piney Point, I took a sequence of photos of one of the expensive crafts as it took on water and sank in St. George Creek. I published the photos with the headline, “Going, Going, Gone...” which earned me a nasty letter from a racer berating me for publishing the photos.
“You don’t know how many people have told me they would love to have copies of those photographs, including the man who owned the boat,” Richard J. Dodds, curator of maritime history at Calvert Marine Museum, said.
“They searched for that boat for nine days,” Dodds said. “They were dragging for days and then they finally got a couple of divers who were working on the Thomas Johnson Bridge to go down with grappling hooks and they finally got it up. The only thing damaged on the boat was that it had a collapsed fuel tank. That boat is still around. It still lives.”
Dodds and CMM Maritime History Registrar Robert Hurry are compiling information for an exhibit on power boat racing in Southern Maryland at the museum.
