With just a couple weeks before the Green Race Woody and I decided to make another version of the Remix 100. We are calling it the Remix Stinger. A boat designed to go as fast as possible down the Green. I met up with a group of our fastest racers and talked about what sort of changes we would like to make. We paddled the 100 and a few other raceboats to compare styles and performance and we came up with a plan. The Remix 100 was arguably the fastest of the race boats in a straight line but it is a little more challenging to maintain your line. So we decided to attack two areas of the boat. One I wanted to make it significantly faster and see if we could handle it, and two I wanted it to track better but not limit the ability to turn as needed.
Here are the finished boats after two 14 hour days for Woody and I of molding and outfitting with the help of John Grace, and Eric "Butter Grab Handle" Hurd. Notice 6'4" Woody Callaway standing next to the 12'5" Remix Stinger. The stats are 12'5" long, and 23.5" wide, and somewhere around 100 gallons would be my guess. As far as design changes go. I added 9" inches of length in just the stern end of the boat so in reality you could say that its like adding 18" of length to the boat because usually you would add length both bow and stern for balance but what we wanted for this boat was the speed of a long stern but the maneuverability of the shorter bow moving through the drops. I also worked on the entry of the bow through the water by tucking the chines under the bow a little more on this version of the boat. The idea behind the pintail and tucked bow chines was to make this version track harder while moving through the cross currents and hammering across the short flat sections of the race section on the Green. Basically we wanted to make a boat that had the potential to go faster than anything has gone before on the Green. After some serious calculations I think this boat is 9.654% faster than anything else on the river. :)
I really like the fact that this boat was made for one single purpose to go fast on the Green and after doing the work to make it happen the first water that all of these boats will touch is the Green. I have to tell you I was a little nervous when we first slid into the water. I knew the boat would be fast but you never know for certain how it will perform in in the rapids. So there were lots of questions going through my head as I slid into the water. The questions of speed was answered immediately by how far the boat glided out away from shore. As we moved downstream John and I smiled about the speed and got more and more confident with each rapid about how the boat handled. By the end we all bombed off Sunshine and raced all the way out to the takeout.
Here are all the photos.
