Big Boy water toys focus on need for speed

In the movie ?Top Gun’ there is a scene in which actors Tom Cruise and Anthony Michael Hall combine speeches to form the quote: “I feel the need; the need for speed.” You could apply that same sentiment to the executive looking for fun out on the water.

In the 1960s, many water lovers had a pontoon boat, those stately catamaran-type leviathans with the canvas awning shading the deck, seating for what looked like 10 and a little outboard motor — usually around 10 to 15 horsepower at the most — puttering it along.

You could probably imagine Ward Cleaver at the helm of a pontoon boat, puffing away on his pipe while gliding past the Joneses and making them green with envy. But you could never imagine him at the controls of some of the bad boys of today such as multiple-seat jet craft or cigarette boats.

“Oh yeah, there are three-seat models,´ said Perry Wilmarth, a sales consultant at Fort Collins Motor Sports in Fort Collins. “We actually have some with four seats.” Wilmarth is talking about a jet craft — often referred to as a Jet Ski, its patented name — the nautical version of the motorcycle that can zip across the water at staggering speeds. Staggering for one of those models is around 65 or 70 mph, but they can go even faster.

This kind of speed is very attractive to a young person, especially if that young person has money or access to it. Scott Young, a salesman at Island Lake Marine in Fort Collins, said it depends on the person, but there is a lot of interest in speed and customization among his well-heeled clientele.

“We have a quarter-million-dollar boat out here that would be perfect for your story,” Young said. “It’s a big ol’ cigarette boat about 40 feet long and 1,150 horsepower. The owner pumped about $7,000 into the motor to put a supercharger in it because he was tired of his kid passing him all the time on his jet craft. Well, now he’s got a boat that can go about 80 miles an hour.”

Young estimated that a high-end jet craft could cost about $10,000 but says that is “pennies” compared with sinking $7,000 into a boat motor because your kid runs rings around you on the lake.

Of course, there are the more sedate boats — big sedate boats. “There’s a 29-foot Rinker cabin cruiser here,” Young said. “That’s for just cruising around on the lake.”

Cruising around seems to be more important than fishing. Maybe there are fishermen among the executive set, but if there are, they’re keeping it firmly in the closet.

“They’re not buying any of those big sports fishing rigs that will carry a full staff,´ said Richard Swanson of Marine Sports West in Loveland. “I know one business owner in Greeley who has a big fishing yacht, but people don’t take these big boats fishing. Boating gets created by friends taking other friends boating. They find they like it so they go out and get a boat themselves.”

Wilmarth said jet craft have changed technologically in the last few years. Environmentalists used to look at them the same way they looked at chainsaws. Some of them still do. They’re noisy, and there is something irritating about the devil-may-care way their operators jump wakes and generally carry on with them.

But jet craft have changed quite a bit. They used to have the two-stroke engines that sounded like a table saw ripping into a piece of oak and required owners to mix the fuel with oil before putting it into the tank. No longer.

“All watercraft that were two-cylinder are now four-cylinder,” Wilmarth said. “They have been doing very well in the last few years. CSU developed technology to develop a more efficient two-stroke engine.”

Popular jet-craft destinations include Lake Powell in southern Utah and Lake McConnaughy in western Nebraska. “They are taking tons of Jet-Skis to Lake Powell,´ said Clay Horst of Powerplay Motor Sports in Loveland. “A lot of them are renting houseboats or buying timeshares there.”

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