resurrection of a race boat  

December 28th 2005- This is the old Pitman Photo boat owned by Ed Tamberino from Sarasota. It was very successful in her day and was put out to pasture last year. Ed is running the Pitman scarab now. I bought the boat from Ed without a motor for a pretty good racer-to-racer price. It was sitting without a cover in the FL sun for a while and it did take its toll on the cockpit. Other than that, she still had good bones and tall stringers. I happen to prefer the lines of the old battlewagons too.

I picked up a trailer in Tampa, loaded the boat up and headed back to the east coast of FL. The next day we headed over to Turbine Marine to pick up an old "piston" engine that John had sold me 2 month prior. We bolted the long block in the boat just for the ride back up north to NJ.

A month later Scott Rogers and I  made a marathon trip to FL and back in a weekend to get the boat home. Scott picked at the vinyl and hull when weather cooperated. We pulled the motor at Smitty's and I dropped the block off  to get the bottom end balanced and clearances checked. I'll put the motor back together from there.

In typical Smitty fashion...and the genuinely generous people that he and Anthony are, he offers to paint the boat, just to keep us on schedule to make the season. Scott and I DA the hull and take anything off that doesn't get shot. We are at that stage right now.

So now that we are up to speed, I'll update our progress via photo's on the following page when I have the time. If you have any suggestions, comments or ideas, we'd love to hear'em. We will be racing in the new P5 class (old P4) with OPA this year for at least 5 races. Now if I can just figure out how this dam* internet works.....