The Biggest Ball Of Them All—Day No. 2 Of The Kuttawa Cannonball Run

Hardware and scenery be damned, no powerboating event is finer than the people it attracts. Take Kuttawa Cannonball Run co-organizer Jeff Hoefling of Evansville, Ind. It’s not as if he doesn’t have a more-than-full-time job running Lively Machine Co., Inc., a thriving business he founded in his hometown. Hoefling also owns a boat—a smoldering Outerlimits SC 37 catamaran with juiced up Mercury Racing 450R outboard engines on its transom—he loves to run.

So he doesn’t need to spend hundreds of hours each year organizing an annual charity event in Kentucky with his fellow Evansville pal Terry Martin as an excuse to go boating with friends.

On a picture-perfect weekend, the ninth annual Kuttawa Cannonball Run once more demonstrated why it remains the biggest ball of them all. Photos by Pete Boden copyright Shoot 2 Thrill Pix.

And yet Hoefling, who also is one mean dude with a zip-tie as he proved this year on a reporter’s bashed-up rental car, and Martin put in those hours every year without complaint. They do it because they love it.

Maybe that’s because the tiny town of Old Kuttawa, Ky., set on the shores of Lake Barkley, becomes a figurative suburb of Evansville each summer. The locals do come out to support the event, as do their fellow Kentuckians and performance-boat owners from adjacent and not-so-adjacent states such as Kelly and Julie O’Hara of and Nolan and Kim Ferris of Upstate New York. But with less than 700 full-time residents, Old Kuttawa is not a sprawling metropolis of diehard performance-boat owners.

A stalwart Kuttawa event supporter, Lake Cumberland Thunder Run co-organizer Justin Lucas ran his 36-foot Statement catamaran with his children Emma and Jackson.

Just a 90-minute drive from Evansville, Lake Barkley is the city’s closest large waterway. And it connects with Kentucky Lake, which extends into Tennessee.

“We came here when we were kids during the summer,” said Donnie MacLeod, who with his wife, Cara, owns a houseboat in Kuttawa Harbor Marine and a are among the event’s key sponsors every year. “It’s kind of our home-water.”

Auctioneer Nolan Ferris looked on as high-bidders took a drink from a shot-ski created by Stephen Miles of Stephen Miles Design.

A brightly lit character with a joyful heart and a touch of mischief in his soul, Ferris is another key player in the event who frankly is far too busy to handle its auctioneer role. He and his wife own and run a summer resort. During the season, they are slammed on the hospitality side of the business. In the off-reason, they’re slammed with the property maintenance that comes with a booming hospitality business.

But he does it anyway.

Last night’s auction raised $110,000-plus for charitable programs handled by the Lyon County (Ky.) Sheriff Department.

“Nolan knocked it out of the park,” Hoefling said. “It was a record-setting night.”

By Ferris’ count, he has raised approximately $10 million for charities as an auctioneer.

Owned by Kuttawa Cannonball Run regulars Jon and Selina Christie. this 25-year-old V-bottom is the only Baja Marine product to boast as Stephen Miles Design paintjob.

“The Kuttawa Cannonball Run is about the people and the cause,” he said. “It works for all the right reasons.

“And I’ve said before, the Cannonball is ‘the biggest ball of them all,’” he added, then laughed.

Photographer Pete Boden, who has captured the Kuttawa happening for the past six of its nine years, agreed.

“It’s such a chill place,” he said. “And that’s all about the people.”

Even when the Saturday portion of the 2024 event was canceled courtesy of foul weather and debris clogging the waterways, Ferris and company managed to coax more than $80,000 from the diminished crowd during that evening’s charity auction. Though the organizers didn’t panic over having to scrub the Saturday run that year, they did discuss moving the event itself to a later date when rainstorms are less likely to drive deadfall into the water.

The group quickly concluded that any date change would overlap with that of another local Southern States event, so they opted to keep their existing dates and cross their fingers.

Yesterday’s lunch at the Breakers Marine in Tennessee was a chilled-out affair.

“We have had seven years and no problems with weather,” Stephen Miles, one of the event’s founders, said at the time. “I’m not sure we need to change anything.”

Thanks to the weather gods, standing pat with dates turned out to be the right move. The worst thing anyone could say about conditions on Friday and Saturday was that they were breezy. The water wasn’t free of debris, but it never is. And the daytime temperatures were in the low-to-high 70-degree range.

Said Hoefling, “We needed the weather to play along for some redemption from last year. It all fell into place.”

Next year, the Kuttawa Cannonball Run will celebrate its 10th anniversary. Of course, no one knows what the weather will bring. Yet this much is certain.

It will be the biggest ball of them all.

On scene to support their Performance Boat Center customers, Cyler Jackson and Michael Hall are big fans of the good-time event. Photo by Matt Trulio

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