In the B runabout race everything started out as normal. The motor fired up, I checked the tattle tale after I got on plane and water was spraying out of the can, so I checked over my left shoulder and turned back down the course to start milling at the far end. The start was nothing out of the ordinary and after we got around the first turn, I began to sort out my position and whether I could make any gains, or just try to hold off anyone who might be behind. I was about in the middle of the pack until on the back straight of the third lap, the motor began to slow down. It seemed to be hitting alright on both cylinders, but it just was losing power. The only thing that came to mind was the Fram filter was getting clogged up. It didn't make sense though because I always checked and made sure the castor oil wasn't gumming them up. We kept good filters and hadn't even run them that much in a short period of time. As I began the fourth lap I decided to stay out in case some boats conked out and I could pick up some more points. By the time I was on the back straight of lap five, the DeSilva runabout had slowed to around 35 mph. There was nothing else to do but finish the lap as long as I was getting water through the motor, and it was.

As I coasted into the pits, I looked at Baldy and lifted both arms up and shrugged my shoulders. I got out and pushed the bow around toward the race course then waded over to help put it on the stands which were in almost knee deep water. Baldy grabbed the top of the Konig with his right hand to pull it over so Mark and I could grab the transom handles. Baldy had to grip firmly to pull the motor and a step second later he bellowed out an obscenity as he plunged his right hand into the lake. Confused and cussing, he spilled a handfull of water on the crankplate and little dancing balls of water instantly formed with a cloud of steam hissing and rising above the ever smaller bouncing balls of water. Mark and I heard and could smell burning flesh. Baldy high tailed it out of the water and ran to the Chrsyler station wagon and jerked open the door to grab an 8 oz plastic bottle of "Aloe 99" that rested on the front seat. He sprayed the pump bottle until his palm was soaked and excess was dripping off. He continued to do this every couple of minutes for about ten or fifteen minutes. One of the healing properties of aloe vera is it's ability to penetrate below the surface of the skin in fairly short order. So even though a lot of the aloe was dripping off, by keeping his palm saturated, he was assured as much as possible was getting into the epidermis below the skin.

In the meantime, Mark and I had doused more water on the crankplate to cool it off, and it took more than a few minutes because the flywheel was heated throughout its mass. Even though it wasn't big, the steel took a lot longer to give off it's heat. Before it even cooled to the point where we could put the wrenches to it I noticed that the aluminum ring on the stator protecting the points and condensers had risen up and was in contact with the crankplate. The FB we had did not have a single piece stator plate. The stator was bolted to the block, but the ring was held onto the stator plate with a bolt on either side from underneath to two small aluminum wedges welded to the ring. The were about 8 mm in width drilled and tapped. Apparently the rough water from the day before had loosened both bolts, and that plus the vibration of the two cylinder FB Konig caused the ring to rise with each successive turn of the bolts until it came into contact with the bottom of the crankplate. The bolt heads must have rested on a boss on the motor (I can't remember) and we had to start the threads and turn them to lower and tighten the ring in place. This was something we never had to deal with before, and when we got home and were doing our repairs, I ended up stripping them out while tightening them.

Baldy was in pretty good pain with such a searing as he got. The flywheel nut was branded into the center of his palm, and the outer edge of the crankplate was seared into the ends of each of his fingers and in a parallel crease along his thumb. Baldy regularly sprayed more aloe on his hand as we rigged down, collected our prize money and bid our farewells before heading home Sunday evening.

Baldy was a big man and as such liked his things cold---his house---his motel room--his beer---and his car. I was always cold natured and turned the air vent off of me or completely closed it when I was driving or riding in the front seat. But during the night, it was generally cool enough were the A/C was just motivating enough to keep him cool. This night however, he had it turned up all the way and it was an artic blast coming out of that vent on his right. I was riding shotgun. Baldy drove with his left hand on the steering wheel and his right hand up against the air vent. Whenever he wanted a dose of aloe he would move his hand from the vent and toward me, where I would liberally spray it down. We stopped somewhere around 11. We went home via U.S. Highway 281, so we most likely stopped in Lampasas near the eastern edge of the Llano Estacado.

The next morning Baldy's hand was tender, but not painful. We were all surprise, including Baldy, that blisters had not formed, but it looked horrible. His palm was nothing but mottled dead skin with purplish, brown and tannish hues. We were only ten or fifteen minutes on the highway before Baldy began to pick at the dead skin. He gingerly lifted a corner at the bottom of his palm and slowly peeled off a long stringer. It was not painful, so he took some more off. About halfway through, he realized there were barely any of the burnt indentions on his fingers. He quickly removed the rest of the stuff and realized that it was not his skin that he was pulling off, but many layers of dried aloe residue. Baldy's "Aloe 99" was 99% pure and not distilled, but merely pressed and filtered. There were very small solids in his juice along with the part that turns purple when exposed to air. That made a huge impression on all of us, even though we knew the healing properties. One thing I learned was that if you get burnt, the sooner you can get aloe very into the damaged area the better. (Unless it's a very serious burn that requires a dr.)