Motorworld (21 page)

I’d been worried about not countering this properly but in fact it was almost natural to keep the taps wide open and simply lean forwards to bring the nose down. Six seconds later, I crossed the line and, for the first time, began to think. Brake at 150 mph and you die. Turn the stubby, shaved, skis and you roll, then die. You sit up on the seat to shave off the speed then v… e… r… y gradually, you apply the brake. And when you’re down to walking speed you turn around and head back.

My heart still beating like a washing machine full of wellingtons, we checked the onboard camera to ensure it had been working and found in the course of the run I’d said just two words: ‘F***ing’ and ‘Hell’.

At the beginning of this epic trek, I made it quite plain that I would climb into absolutely anything, no matter how fast or seemingly dangerous. But I drew the line at white-water rafting.

Odd then that I should be happy to fly halfway round the world on a non-smoking aeroplane to drive up those same rapids… at 100 mph… in a jet boat.

Mad? Oh sure, but you see, I don’t trust anything that doesn’t have an engine.

Jet propulsion for boats is now
de rigueur
if you want the finished product to cruise at more than 30 mph. Go to the Isle of Man on a Seacat and it’ll be jets that get you there. Go wetbiking off a tropical beach and it’ll be jets that provide the thrills. Look at the back of any fast naval ship and it’ll be jet propelled, as is Destriero, which ten years ago charged across the Atlantic to take the Blue Riband from Richard Branson.

The idea of jet power was born in New Zealand when Bill Hamilton who, incidentally, was the first man ever to do 100 mph at Brooklands, decided to build a boat to tackle the shallow rivers that crisscross his land.

Jet planes were all the rage so he started work on the same idea, sucking water into an impeller then thrusting it out of the back below the waterline.

It was, however, not until he employed a young engineer called George Davis that it began to work. George designed a system whereby the water flowed in a straight line, and figured out that the water should be thrown out of the back above the waterline.

‘It was basically Newton’s third law,’ he told me. ‘If you fire a bullet, the rifle recoils. So we fired the water one way and the boat was pushed the other.’ It was simple stuff and what made it better still is that no rudder was needed. To turn the boat you simply turned the jet outlet pipe.

So now they had a boat with no prop and no rudder, a boat that only needed a couple of inches of water. All they needed to do was show the world how clever they’d been.

In the 1950s, Bill’s sons Jon and George led an expedition up the Colorado, taking their jet-propelled boats through mountainous rapids and right through the Grand Canyon. It was the first time this had ever been achieved and, thanks to the dams, it’ll never be done again.

Having succeeded there, intrepid explorer John Blashford-Snell invited the Kiwis to provide back-up on his Congo expedition and later, Sir Hillary used their jet boats on the Ganges.

The ferocity they faced was simply horrendous; 50-foot-high waves, whirlpools 100 yards across, fallen trees being swept towards them and, on the Congo, seagoing conditions superimposed on violent river water.

The jet boat had proved itself and became a global smash hit. But the story doesn’t quite end there. Pop down to a river for a quiet picnic in New Zealand these days and you
won’t have long to wait before the tranquillity is shattered by a 15-foot jet boat tearing by at upwards of 100 mph.

Powered by big and unsilenced V8s, these aluminium-hulled boats meet at a prearranged point and simply race to another spot which may well be 100 miles away.

There’s no point learning the river either, because one storm can completely change everything. You just boat along hoping that the motor keeps going because without it there is no steering. And you will crash.

I went for a ride and was amazed. In an ordinary boat, you’re constantly looking for signs of deep water to keep the prop safe but in a jet boat you can run quite happily with the hull very obviously on the bottom – and it doesn’t matter.

Water that wouldn’t even dampen a pair of ballet shoes is deep enough for these boys. The trouble is that picnickers and Maoris don’t take kindly to city boys dancing with the devil in what even I’ll admit is spectacular countryside. Which is one of the reasons why the Kiwis have now come up with jet sprinting.

The boats are small – twelve feet long – but the engines are not. Mine had a supercharged V8.

The actual course closely resembles a plate of spaghetti with no straight bits and an endless array of twists, turns and crossovers. Trying to drive the boat and concentrate on which way to go as well would be impossible so you take along a passenger who, using hand signals, keeps you posted.

The water is a couple of feet deep or so, but the drivers cut corners, actually running on the bank for half an hour
or so. This however, is not so they can get past the boat in front. I was saddened to learn that the jet boats go out there all alone, racing purely against the clock – until I heard the reason.

This is that the jet units are so powerful that they use all the water in the river. Peer through the spray from that outlet pipe and you’ll see that the channel behind the boat is actually bone dry, so if you come up behind another boat, you just… stop.

Driving the boat is hard because you must forget everything you ever learned in a car. You lift off in the micro straights so that you can engage full power and thus have full turning ability through the corners.

It sounded all right in theory but from the passenger’s seat, I don’t ever remember going in a straight line. It was simply a case of turning left, left, left, right, left, right, right… that quickly and constantly.

To get a feeling for what it’s like you must imagine that God has hold of the back end and is trying to shake your teeth out. At the same time, he is also trying to rip your head off by shaking it from side to side. And all this is going on while you are inside the sound system at a Metallica concert.

Now, you may be wondering why God would want to smash these boats, and I think I have the answer.

He’s jealous because man has invented something wonderful – and something He never thought of.

Italy: Tony Waite; Cuba: Morris Carpenter/Insight; Detroit: Andy Wilman; Iceland: Andy Wilman; Japan: Peto Seaward/Tony Stone Images; Switzerland (2): Morris Carpenter/Insight; Vietnam: Norman Lomax; Australia: Oliver Strewe/Tony Stone Images; Texas: Andy Wilman; Monaco: Andy Wilman; India: Alain Evrard/Robert Harding Picture Library; F-15: copyright © George Hall/CORBIS.