BIDDEFORD, Maine — Miles off the coast of the southeastern U.S., the swells began to build. And as the speedboat slammed into them at 70 to 80 miles an hour, the pounding took a toll on the man at the wheel.
“We together have about 30,000 miles in a high-speed boat,” Mike Howe says, referring to his wife, Sarah, and himself. “That’s around the world. And I’ve never experienced pounding like that, because it was so repetitious. I felt like at some point I was getting concussed. I would have, like, white light go through my head. Boom! Boom! Every time.”
Sarah’s worst hours had come earlier in the day.
“I got pretty seasick,” she says, which was a new and unwelcome sensation. “I’ve never been seasick in a moving boat.”
Her luck changed that day, and the seasickness lasted for about five hours, apparently brought on by her intense focus on the dashboard imaging screen that warned of hazards on the water. How bad off was she? “Puking in a coffee cup,” Mike says, succinctly. “Miserable.”
The pounding, the seasickness, the speed, and the swells were not inflicted on the Howes. They had courted them when they left their home in Maine in July with an audacious goal: To eat breakfast in New York City, race south along the Atlantic seaboard, and arrive in Miami—in record time—for dinner.
The trip would pose a series of challenges, the type the Howes relish. Mike is an inventor and entrepreneur, co-founder with his twin brother of Howe & Howe Technologies in Waterboro. Sarah is a police officer. What they share is a passion for adventure.
Despite the swells and nausea, the Howes were actually ahead of their projected pace when they reached Tybee Island, Georgia, seemingly on their way to breaking the record for the fastest boat run from New York to Miami. But thunderstorms lay in their path, storms they couldn’t evade or outrun, and the resulting delays meant dinner in Miami was no longer possible.
They instead spent the night in St. Augustine, Florida, and the next day, with clear skies and calm seas, made excellent time to their destination. They had not broken the record for the fastest boat run from NYC to Miami, but they had set a record in a different category — the fastest trip in an outboard boat. For those keeping score: 34 hours.
Is this the last such run for the Howes? When asked about future attempts to set a record on this route, Sarah spoke up without hesitation: “I want to do it again.”