It’s been said that if you walk into a local tavern up in beautiful Lake Chelan sporting a Manson Marina RC Boat Racing t-shirt, the men will avoid direct eye contact and keep a respectful distance. The women, however, are apt to be less timid. That’s right, Thin Lizzy, the boys are back in town — and they’re racing toy boats.

The Bigger the Boy

As a kid, I briefly participated in the heady sport of slot car racing. It was enough of a rage in my town of San Jose, California that you could bring your little electric race cars to a large indoor track housed in a vacant store front and take on all comers. My cars, which were purely stock, were no match for the kids who tricked theirs out to extract every last electron their miniaturized armatures could deliver. Some of these cars were so powerful that the biggest challenge was keeping them from flying off the track at every curve. At times the mayhem was splendid.

I’ve often thought that the boys (girls in those days wouldn’t stoop to such trivial pursuits) who devoted their free time to customizing their micro machines most likely went on to restoring muscle cars as a form of mid-life therapy. I could always imagine the exaggerated eye rolls emanating from the females in their lives, followed by the oft heard cliche, “The bigger the boys, the bigger their toys.”

At Meyer Sign & Advertising, however, our veteran sales guy Gregg Collins has turned that axiom on its head. Not content to simply motor the placid waters of Lake Chelan in his boat, “Collin Sick,” he and a cohort of lost boys from a Neverland known as Manson have scaled their way down to vessels that match in inches the length in feet of their big boy boats. 

Size Matters

As Gregg tells the story, it all started with a Christmas gift. “My wife bought me a little 17” remote control boat five years ago. We went to Lake Chelan that January, and I’m running it around out on the lake, and I take a video of it on my phone and send it to some guys that I know at the Manson Marina. The text said, ‘Don’t show up this summer without a boat — we’re racing RC boats!’ And so it kind of just built from there.” 

Thus was born the Manson Marina RC Boat Racing Club — and the face of high performance marine racing was forever altered.

In the spirit of Groucho Marx’s famous proclamation that he would never join an organization that would have him as a member, the qualifications for membership in the Manson Marina RC Boat Racing Club are anything but rigorous. In fact, the only actual specification is that the boats have to be electric — a restriction that may have been born more out of the bother of messing around with gasoline than with environmental consciousness. Another possible qualification is that you have to consider Bloody Marys to be a nutritionally balanced breakfast.

The club’s earliest boats could top out at about 20 miles an hour, but they were dangerous. Whenever they flipped over (which was a lot), the operator would have to jump into the water to right his craft — leaving him vulnerable to the razor sharp steel blades of the other boats’ propellers. And then, as Gregg recalls, “One guy went out and bought a faster boat…and that’s all it took.” The arms race was on. “It just snowballed from there. They just kept getting bigger and faster. Now we’re up to 36-inch boats that do about 50.” Fortunately, the boats are now self-righting, which means that club members will have to invent more creative ways of introducing further mayhem into their races.

Compared to the real thing, RC boats are at least a couple of orders of magnitude less expensive. But that doesn’t mean they’re cheap. There are a number of online sources for the boats, but as is the case with most hobbies, the initial cost is really just the price of admission. As Gregg explains, “The boats cost about $400, but then you have about another $300 into parts and batteries — so by the end of the summer you have about $800 – $900.” 

Hearing this from Gregg, I have to admit that the math seemed a bit suspect — but who was I to question? Club member Jeff McCann feels no such compunction. Commenting on fellow members Gregg and Dave Sneesby, he observes, “I just race one boat per season, but Dave and Gregg will secretly buy other boats. Gregg once told me that he didn’t tell his wife how much he spent on his boats.” (Gregg…your secret is safe with us…and every other of the several thousand people who are reading this. Besides, it’s probably just sour grapes anyway, right?).

Life in the Fast Lane

The Manson Marina RC Boat Racing Club season runs every Saturday from Memorial Day in May through September, culminating with Lake Chelan’s annual Hydrofest races in Manson. Race day begins with the aforementioned Breakfast of Champions: Bloody Marys. The course is defined by two buoys spaced 75 yards apart, and each race consists of four consecutive seven lap sprints, taking approximately 2 1/2 minutes to complete each one. Think of it as the attention deficit disorder derby. The boats line up and an affable octogenarian named Bill serves as the starter. “He used to say, ‘on your mark, get set…but he dragged it out so long that we finally asked him to just say go,” says Gregg. Jeff describes what follows as something “like a choreographed demolition derby.”

Listening to the adrenaline pounding fury of a race caught on video, you hear what sounds like a cross between a nest of disturbed hornets and a chorus of amplified Remington razors. A leader board keeps score over the duration of the season, and with eight races each weekend the scoring is 20 points for a first place finish and 15 points for second place — known less charitably as “the first loser”. The winter off-season is a time for tweaking boats and talking trash — and there’s plenty of both. By the end of the season, Dave notes, “our boats are pretty much held together with glue and gorilla tape.”

Now in its fifth year as a Lake Chelan sporting institution, the Manson Marina RC Boat Racing Club is too legit to quit. The club not only has an official t-shirt (design courtesy of Meyer Sign & Advertising, thank you very much), it also has its own Facebook page (complete with race videos recorded by indulgent spouses) and holds a semi-coherent weekly radio call-in with Jeff Conwell of local station KOZI. Apparently, people in Chelan still listen to the radio. 

Playing for Keeps

With race awards that make the Lombardi Trophy look like something out of a box of Cracker Jack, and sponsorship dollars and bragging rights at stake, things can get pretty competitive among the members of the Manson Marina RC Boat Racing Club. At present, Gregg Collins is a toy boat dynasty of one, having claimed three out of four championship titles. One should point out, however, that there is a marked difference in how Gregg recounts his rise to fame and glory and how Jeff and Dave remember it.

To begin with, Dave points out, Gregg has a math problem that extends beyond the price of his boats. “He has a tendency to miscount his laps,” he diplomatically puts it. “During a race I’ll be thinking, ‘how did you get ahead of me when I was ahead of you and you never passed me?” During season two, however, Gregg caught his big break. The water was really choppy that season, Dave notes, and although he recalls leading Gregg by a “substantial number of points,” Gregg was ultimately more adept at navigating the rough waters and surpassed him.

It should be pointed out, however, that there is an alternate version of Gregg’s breakthrough victory. “Dave and I let him win because we felt sorry for him,” says Jeff.

Regardless of its origin myth, Gregg’s dominance in his sport has not been without its challengers. Last year, club member Kurt Sixel upped the competitive ante with a custom designed rudder that flexed rather than going straight down into the water. “I couldn’t catch him,” Gregg recalls, still visibly frustrated. “He was 200 points up on me at one point. Finally, in August, I got somewhere close to him, and ended up beating him by about 100 points at the end of the year. It took hours tinkering with my boats in my garage on weekdays.”

This last remark illustrates yet another aspect of Gregg’s winning form. It’s persistence as much as petulance that has transformed him into the Dale Earnhardt of RC boat racing. “I think he tinkers with his boats seven days a week, 24 hours a day,” says Jeff. “I don’t see how he sells anything for Meyer Sign. I don’t see how his boats even float. He pounds the living snot out of them, but they still run.”

Eventually, Gregg lost to the man who fashioned the club’s epic trophies, Dave Sneesby. “It wasn’t even close,” Gregg admits, “In fact, it was embarrassing. And I probably take it a little more seriously.” Ya think? Sales guys are, after all, competitive by nature. “I’d show up at work every Monday and whine if I had a bad weekend, until Ken (Hitt) would finally tell me to shut up. Last year I was having my ass kicked so bad that he said, “I’m done…get a new boat…I’ll buy it just to shut you up.” So I got a new boat — and I still couldn’t catch Dave!”

The Ties that Bind

It should be noted that despite Gregg’s competitive zeal, he came to Dave Sneesby’s rescue when his challenger had two boats go down last year. “So he ended up running my back up boat all year — which was great because I have Trump graphics on it and he hates Trump.  So he would take my lid off and run his own.”

Which brings us to the part of this story that I really wanted to tell to begin with — the story of how five different individuals with different political persuasions and backgrounds overcome the schisms that seem to so deeply divide our beautiful country these days. As Gregg recounts, “One year I ran with a Trump doll head on my boat and three of the guys hated Trump, so every time he would fall out of my boat they would run over it with theirs. I’ve tried to bungee cord and glue him in, but he always bounces back.” It’s a case of life imitating art. 

I’ve suggested to Gregg that his club might extend the political themes to perhaps include a line of after-market RC boat components. Imagine how ones boat might perform with a sweet Clinton Overdrive (starts out strong, but loses power before the finish line), or a McConnell Motor (known for its incomprehensible droning sound), or a Rush Rudder System (which constantly pulls to the right). The possibilities are endless, and a popular color scheme for season 5 may be “Impeach Mint.”

What keeps the Manson Marina RC Boat Racing Club as tightly bonded as the Sons of Anarchy, however, are things that ultimately matter the most in life: the love of where you live, the pleasure of family pastimes, and perhaps more than anything else, the joy of playing together. We used to get that as kids, but we seem to forget it as adults. Gregg Collins and his club members still remember. And after all, as Gregg sagely observes, “If our parents had bought us this stuff when we were kids, we wouldn’t have to be doing it now.” We’re glad they are, and Lake Chelan and the world is a happier and kinder place for it.