Lake Havasu is a place and especially the Desert Storm Poker Run has become an event you must do at least once if you are into performance boating. I have been many times and I trailered by own boat out to the Lake last July just to go boating and be able to say I did it. While some may think Lake Havasu is a rather unlikely place to draw such a crowd of performance enthusiasts, it does draw them and that is all that matters. The Desert Storm Poker Run was certainly different for me this year. Tres and I only had a few people signed up for the Performance Boat School, and I did not have a boat to run during the event. To maximize my time over the weekend and get back to Fort Lauderdale to participate in another event, we flew in on Wednesday and Flew out on Friday. I raced to the lake on Wednesday after landing in Vegas and making the now customary stop at “In and Out” Burger. This year we dined with our South Florida neighbor and friend from Marine Technologies, Tim Gallagher. Then we were off and of course, just my luck, just before the speed trap at Searchlight, Nevada I got pulled over by the highway patrol and got a nice speeding ticket. Tim who was behind me in his rental got off with a verbal warning and he ended up winning the rental car race from Vegas to Havasu.
I did get to spend all of my time at the street party talking about boats and boating with everyone who came buy our PBN booth. I was thrilled to see people I didn’t know wearing our Power Boat Nation T- Shirts at breakfast at the hotel. This may not seem like much but to me it means the word about what we are doing and how we are doing it is getting out. Of course the PowerBoatNation.com girls got a bunch of attention and they were happy to stop and take pictures with everyone on the street.
PowerboatNation.com is so much more than a online forum and the comments and conversations I had with many members booth new and old who stopped by our booth to say hello reinforced that what we are doing is appreciated and valued by all and these comments were repeated over and over again.
Brad Schowenwald
Here are just a few of the boaters we captured:
Peter Hledin Douglas Marine “SKATER”
Wayne Schaldenbrand from Sunsation Powerboats
Erik Christiansen and Mike Griffiths from Mercury Racing
