Top 10 Stories Of 2019, Part II

In terms of traffic, the biggest article of the past year on speedonthewater.com was also one of the saddest stories I had to write in 2019. In fact, the loss of one of the nicest, most fun performance boat owners I’ve ever interviewed—Louisiana’s Michael Pierce, who died in a car accident in early December—was read close to 50,000 times, a number that was slightly higher than the story on the debut of Mercury Racing’s 450R engine, which was the first story mentioned in my fellow speedonthewater.com publisher and OffshoreOnly.com columnist Matt Trulio’s first part of our annual Top 10 Stories of the Year columns.

This year the Florida Powerboat Club hosted its largest fleet ever for the Key West Poker Run. Photo courtesy Florida Powerboat Club

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As Trulio said yesterday, narrowing down hundreds of stories we wrote for this website and speedonthewater.com is never easy. We each reported on some great ones, such as our good friend Shaun Torrente, who is part of the speedonthewater.com test team, winning back-to-back titles in the prestigious F1 H2O World Championship. There was also the news about the Lake of the Ozarks Shootout in Central Missouri raising a record $357,000 for local charities, the positive progression of brand-specific events from Cigarette, DCB, MTI, Outerlimits and more, Formula Boats discontinuing is venerable FAS³Tech sportboat line and Ashton Rinker defending his NGK F1 national championship by going undefeated in 2019.

Of course we reported on several incredible projects, a variety of new raceboats, some seriously cool and intriguing boats from center consoles and catamarans to sportboats and even pontoons, as well as a lot of “happy customer” deliveries from DCB Performance Boats, Nor-Tech, Sunsation and more.

Read more: Top 10 Stories Of 2019, Part II

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