Image Of The Week—Who Said Center Consoles Can’t Fly?
Of all the photos we’ve published of “powerboats in flight” on speedonthewater.com during the past 15 years, most have been of the purpose-built catamarans and closed-deck V-bottom variety. And though they are fewer and farther between these days thanks to the ongoing boom in performance-oriented center-consoles, those traditional purpose-built powerboats remain the most common subjects in such images.
Level flight, Nor-Tech 390 Sport center-console-style. Photo by Pete Boden copyright Shoot 2 Thrill Pix.
There are lots of very good reasons for this, of course, the embracing, sit-down buckets found in high-performance cats and smattering of V-bottoms and the body-hugging bolsters of the Cigarette and Outerlimits deep-cockpit V-bottom kind being chief among them.
But there are exceptions to this general rule, and we found a doozy of one courtesy of Florida Powerboat Club members Jack and Jen Cuoto and speedonthewater.com chief photographer Pete Boden.
To celebrate their one-year anniversary of owning a Nor-Tech 390 Sport center console powered by four Mercury Racing 450R outboard engines, the Maryland couple ran it in last Saturday’s Tampa Bay Poker Run. And as reported on speedonthewater.com, the waters near the famed Sunshine Skyway Bridge. But that didn’t keep the Couto’s from launching big at least once during the day, and Boden was there to nail it.
We won’t tell you not to try this at home; because we don’t care what you try at home.
But we will say it’s among the most dramatic photos of a performance-oriented center console in flight we’ve ever published.
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