Todd Kelly

I have always been into boats. My brother Rick and I started to make our own boats at the age of about 7or 8 on dad’s building sites out of framing pine. We used to make pretend engines and drivers out of wood and paint them up and then run up and down the river with fishing line tied to them. From then on both Rick and I wished for a remote control boat nearly every birthday and Christmas.

Over the years, Rick and I have spent hours in the shed building different styles of remote control boats out of balsa wood, ply wood and fiberglass and modified them to go faster. We would take them down to the river and race each other after school and on the weekends.

It seems that not much has changed. Except the amount of money we spend on them now days. In our time away from racing we still enjoy making our own boats and trying to ‘out do’ each other by making them go faster.

My first smell of avgas and sound of a race engine was not long after I was born.

Dad had always wanted a race boat and he began to build his very first at the same time as I was being built, 1978.

A race boat isn't like a car where you buy one and drive off, a race boat is something you build and design from a bare hull.

You can obviously buy a complete boat from someone who has done all the work but as most of it is custom and hand built, its extremely hard to find something for sale that is built the way you would have done it.

Dad's first hull was a skicraft interceptor and was metallic green. He got a big block Chev to go into it and called it Shamrock.

The boat was fairly un-modified as far as the engine and was a good introduction to ski racing. Shamrock was raced in 1979 and 1980.

In 1982 dad sold Shamrock and purchased a 292 straight six Chev truck engine and started designing his next boat.

He bought an Alpha one Mercruiser stern drive in 1983 and ordered a 19ft Connelly Craft in 1984 and put it all together that year to race in the 6 cylinder inboard class.

They called it Saggers.