S&S racer named Blitzed. Prettiest boat I have ever been aboard. She did not look this good when I knew her.
This is the boat I helped my father, along with the rest of my family, deliver from where she was found drifting, without her owner, around 1978, off the Texas coast to Clearwater Florida. My family and I joined my father in New Orleans where a number of mishaps and broken equipment forced the owner's widow and my father to call for a tow into port. We sailed her as far as Mobile Bay where a storm cut her anchor rode and we ended up on a sand bar in the middle of the night. I don't believe Dotti, the widow, ever got her farther than Mobile Bay. My father likes to tell people that Blitzen was cursed.
Her husband was affectionately known as "Hippy Fred" to us Gilmores, and I remember he made a living building custom chopper motorcycles in a little shop annexed to Clark Mill's Marine Ways. He had a dog named Snidely, a tall lanky white dog with black spots and a whip tail. Snidely had been known, if he didn't like you, to catch you at the end of a finger dock and chest-check you into the water. You could practically see him brushing the dirt off his paws as he mosied back to his spot in front of Hippy Fred's garage.
-Will (Dragonfly)