OBSERVER’S SEAT
BY KEVIN SPAISE
BATTER UP!
I
van Rodriguez is in his mid-20s, he’s making upwards of $7 million a year
(including endorsements) and, as a major league baseball catcher, has to
have one of the world’s greatest jobs. On an early March day in Florida that hosts a number of major league teams during their preseason conditioning and exhibition seasons, you can almost feel baseball in the warm air.
It is the first official day of training for pitchers and catchers, and Rodriguez is expected to report after a four-month seasonal layoff from the diamond. But on this March day, even as his Texas Rangers teammates are beginning to gather on a field of dreams some 50 miles away, Ivan does not feel like going to work.
Ivan Rodriguez did not earn the honor of being named the best player in the American League by having sloppy work habits; if you’ve ever watched him behind the plate, you already know that. This is not a case of another spoiled American athlete fooling around at the expense of his chosen sport.
It is merely a reminder that our celebrities, our athletes, our idols, are not so different than we are under similar circumstances. And no matter what you do for a living—even
if
you make millions playing a little boys game in front of hundreds of thousands of adoring fans—there are more powerful forces at work once you’ve discovered the joys of performance powerboating.
And that is what is on the mind of Ivan Rodriguez on this spring day as he eyes his new 38-foot Cigarette Top Gun and contemplates his options. Rodriguez is a newcomer to the ranks of the enthusiast- level performance powerboat, but the hook has been set, and deep.
Ultimately—after a minor bout of selfindulgence, a precious hour more seat time in the spanking new boat—Rodriguez will climb into his midnight-blue Ferrari and growl through the gears as he fades into the distance.
Soon his mind will be on handling pitchers and hitting the curveball. But for now, Ivan Is like the rest of us mortals. To hell with the work, he just wants to go boating.
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FUEL CONCERNS RISING
The recent hike in fuel prices may be enough to make us back off the throttle a bit, but it won’t keep most of us from boating. However, the orchestrated lack of supply has created new concerns over fuel quality, as well as quantity. And that, says experts from Mercury High Performance, presents a problem.
One of our readers was recently shopping high-performance tunnels and had decided that he wanted the reliability and performance of a high-output Mercury Racing outboard motor. He wasn’t after anything particularly wild, and his somewhat moderate performance goals (70- 75 mph) made him a candidate for a set of Team Black’s 225 Pro-Max fuel-injected motors.
That is, until our reader astutely checked his marina and found nothing better than 87-octane fuel. Mercury recommends a minimum of 89 octane in alt of their Pro- Max motors, and the declining quality of pump gas has led to plans to increase that rating to 91.
It’s a sad state when a forgiving, fuelinjected, electronically managed outboard cannot live on the area’s best gas. “He may not have problems today or tomorrow, but that motor absolutely will not survive long-term running low-octane fuel—especially when it is as bad as some that we’ve seen,” explained a Mercury racing engineer.
The four-cycle motors are also affected by declining octane levels but are less susceptible to damage.
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