Hydros: This was all before my time, which is why I'm asking about it here, but I'm curious about the timing (the years) of skid-fins being moving farther and farther to the left. So far as I can tell, up to the late-'40s, skid fins (which looked like Keller's runabout fins used in later decades) were mounted under the centerline of the boat. By the early Fifties, it looks like the fast guys were offsetting them maybe 8" to the left. Was it in the late Fifties that you old guys started screwing a fin that you had saber-sawed out of sheet aluminum to the inside edge of the left sponson? And when did you start hooking the fin to the back of the left sponson with a bracket? Can any names be attached to these innovations?

My questions are prompted by my just having looked at part of a YouTube copy of the Fifties movie "Bernardine" (ref. Ron Hill's thread on this) in which Russ Hill and a bunch of other A Stock Hydros are racing. What struck me was how much more smoothly and quickly hydros could take the corners in later decades, with their fins mounted way out to the left. My own first raceboat was a Hal Kelly "Jupiter," and not knowing any better, I followed these obsolete plans to the extent of sawing out a big sheet-aluminum fin and screwing it to the inside of the sponson. Besides being slow, that was a rotten-turning boat, which threw me out in both heats of my first race!!

Runabouts: Here fins have gone both ways. In the mid-Sixties, nearly all runabouts mounted their Keller fins somewhat left-of-centerline. But Terry Feroe, a real fast Reg. 10 BU Sid-Craft driver (had the kilo record for while) said to put the fin on centerline. Many years later, somebody hung a big slab of sheet aluminum on a bracket on the extreme left side of his runabout (maybe Ric Montoya, maybe Selvidge). Big and ugly, but apparently effective, since a lot of guys tried them (with older runabout racers complaining that they now couldn't see anything in the turns for the wall of water thrown up by these side fins!). But some years later yet, oh maybe late-Nineties, I talked to old Bob Montoya at a one-time club boat test-day with informal races, and he said that the centerline-mounted bottom fin had made something of a comeback in runabouts because they seemed to work well on tight-radius turns. I remarked to Bob that Terry Feroe had told me that some thirty years earlier.

What do you ancient mariners have to say?

(EDIT) (Sorry the first version of this was such a mess; usually I catch it when my computer or Win 10.1 sabotages my efforts).