(click to enlarge photos)
Published in The Seattle Times online on July 31, 2025
and in PacificNW Magazine of the printed Times on August 3, 2025
What’s the big deal? A longtime Seattleite finally catches Hydro Fever
By Jean Sherrard
After two hours this spring at Stan Sayres Pits on Lake Washington, I finally flipped for the hydros. The impossibly sleek, brightly colored, vintage unlimited hydroplanes streaking across blue-gray waters on a cloudy morning sent my aging heart all a-flutter.
When I grew up in Seattle, the hydros’ throaty roar left me underwhelmed. I never leashed a plywood model
of Miss Bardahl to my Stingray and raced through puddles trying for a roostertail. Crossing the Lacey V. Murrow floating bridge during the Seafair races was the closest I got to the action.
David D. Williams, executive director of the Hydroplane and Raceboat Museum in Kent, hooked and landed me during the museum’s spring testing event.
“Our mission is to honor, celebrate and preserve the legacy of hydroplane racing,” Williams says, and it’s only after seeing them “on the water bouncing around at 160 mph that you will truly understand how they captured the imagination of an entire city.”
With a lifelong passion for the sport and a breadth of knowledge of history, technology and the culture of speed, Williams is head torch carrier for a golden age of hydroplanes. “My childhood,” he says, “was a tent raised on two tent poles. There was Christmas and there was Seafair.”
After World War II, hydroplane racing scaled up exponentially, inspiring and transporting legions of fans. By 1955, Seattle’s population reached 457,000. That year, 500,000 people from across the state crowded the shores of Lake Washington to watch the races live.
In his seminal 2007 book, “Hydroplane Racing in Seattle,” Williams details what might be described as an inevitable arranged marriage. “We were the boating capital and the aviation capital of the country — and the best of both of those worlds coalesced into hydroplanes.”
Before Seafair and its “hydro fever,” there were only two games in town: Husky football and Pacific Coast League Seattle Rainiers baseball. Today’s deep civic pride in the city’s major sports franchises, Williams says, “was born and bred … when Seattle sports fans first found their collective voice cheering for the hometown’s Slo-Mo-Shuns.”
Today’s turbine-driven hydroplanes, while safer, quieter and faster, somehow sidestep the intimate if raucous sensory nostalgia — and admittedly lethal
danger — of an earlier age, documented by the Hydroplane Museum and its dedicated volunteers.
“These [older] boats were the heart and soul of our community for the better part of 40 years,” Williams says. “In noise and spectacle and goosebumps, they win hands down.”
Seeing and hearing the vintage boats do their thing in person goosed my own bumps. Who knew a rooster tail could make this boomer crow with joy?
WEB EXTRAS
To check out our narrated 360 degree video shot in the Stan Sayres Pits, speed on over here.
More photos from the pits — plus some other extras!
And a few from the Hydro Museum:
Several contributions from Seattle historian Peter Blecha:
Several contributions from Dina Skeels, Seattle Times designer:
(Above) A friend of Dina Skeels pilots the same hydro in a canal at Ocean Shores in 2021 before the boat was restored.
Plus a neighborhood, handmade hydro contest that spans 60 years.
And a final blast from the past: a Bob Hale Gold Cup preview that ran Aug. 10, 1958, in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
I’ve loved the hydro races since childhood. I had friends near Seward Park and we’d go down to the beach to watch the races. For my 65th birthday my husband took me to the Hydroplane Museum for a tour. I had a 1957 Seafair Hydro Race Pin which I gave to Bill Kossen (former Seattle Times – now deceased) for his collection. Bill and I were related by marriage and I enjoyed his articles in the Times. I’m 78 now and still a fan.
Those piston boats could be heard from surprising distances. As a kid, I was amazed to hear that roar from Arbor Heights/Fauntleroy.
Only seen races close up twice, (at 15 – friend’s family yacht with rare warm lake water, I bobbed in and then itched for a couple days, and at 25, tagging along with a genie-lift employee). Otherwise, caught all I could on the television.
I’ll have to make a visit to that museum. Thanks for this, and all you put together on your posts.
Great piece – thank you!
Very nice thorough and interesting feature. Idk the old Notre Dame was still around. It was always the loudest piston when Muncey drove it.