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The Fastest Boat |
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The Perilous Pursuit (excerpt) |
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Craig Arfons - On a Wing and a Prayer |
Jon Craig Arfons
Excerpt from The Perilous Pursuit
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Craig Arfons ... approach centered on notions gleaned from a career as a notable builder and driver of jet drag cars. Undressed, his glossy, 25-foot record challenger was a stretched Dever tunnel drag boat. The powerplant was the small General Electric J85-17 turbojet. The entire package weighed only 2,500 pounds with fuel and driver. Arfons calculated that this aggressive thrust-to-weight ratio would give him an advantage over [Ken] Warby.
The morning of the official attempt in the summer of 1989, at Jackson Lake, near Sebring, Fla., Arfons said: "I'm a little bit numb right now with the heebie-jeebies. But I'm anxious to get out there. We're going to give it a try." He seemed to know that he was climbing into bottled lightning. Arfons flew into his first pass with the jet's afterburner switched on full tilt. A ragged roostertail broadcast the first message of trouble. Then all hell happened. The featherweight boat rocked side to side in an escalating shuffle, climbed and barrel-rolled several times with sickening force. One hour and thirty-four minutes later Jon Craig Arfons was pronounced dead.
(Reprinted from "The Perilous Pursuit" by David Speer, Powerboat Magazine, June 1998)
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