Somewhere high over Texas right now and headed back to Florida, I almost wish I could have stayed for the rest of the 38th annual Lake of the Ozarks Shootout. I’d forgotten how expansive the Central Missouri event has become. When I began covering it the mid-1990s, the only thing to after dark was drink beer and head to the go-kart tracks with my Powerboat magazine teammates, then get thrown out for reckless driving.
There’s always something happening at the Lake of the Ozarks Shootout. Image by Jeff Helmkamp copyright Helmkamp Photos.
Eventually, the local track-owners got wise to us and began calling one another after our first ejection of the evening.
Risky stupid and obnoxious, yes, but those were good times. Yet immature males cannot live on crashing go-karts into one another after dark alone, especially when they keep getting banned from the practice.
Now there are tons of less-sketchy entertainment options during the Shootout. The cities around the lake have grown to include endless day-and-night distractions. And from beginning to end, the event itself has something scheduled every day.
But the key world in my first sentence is “almost.” Not only do I have weekend plans back in Sarasota, not the least of which is getting some rest, I need to get off the road. It’s been an extensive travel-summer. A break will do wonders.
Not to worry, gentle readers, speedonthewater.com contributor Eric Colby—my former boss at Powerboat—arrives tomorrow to close out our coverage, which has been solid so far. Thanks in large part to reporter J.R. Bellis and photographers Pete Boden and Jeff Helmkamp, six of the 12 articles we’ve published since Monday have been Shootout stories.
And there’s still a day-and-half before boats take to the three-quarter-mile course for the Saturday and Sunday competition.
One thing I never forgot about the Shootout? Central Missouri in August leans—and I mean hard—toward miserably hot. That thousands of folks who strolled the Shootout On The Strip affair on Bagnell Dam Boulevard yesterday evening were a sticky testament to their mad passion for performance boats. It was hotter and more humid at the lake yesterday than it was in Sarasota, where I should land in about an hour.
So there’s no place like home, I reckon. But there’s still a part of me, albeit a tiny masochistic one, that wishes I were still there.