The last flight of the Ariel V

It was the Sunday of Labour Day weekend in 1958, a late-summer’s day, still and overcast. My mother, her five brothers, and their mother piled into the family’s wood-panelled Ford station wagon. Slung low, it crunched down the gravel driveway of their cottage on Lake Muskoka and turned north onto Highway 11 towards Huntsville, Ont. My mother, ten years old at the time, remembers the excitement. For the first time, she was going to watch her father race. To her, he was a beloved dad, the one who improvised jazz on the piano, told spellbinding stories, and could make nickels disappear in a sleight of hand. But on that day, she was going to see him as Will Braden, one of Canada’s fastest boat racers, doing that legendary thing: flying over the water in one of his hydroplane boats.

When the family arrived at Memorial Park in Huntsville, they joined several thousand spectators gathering around Fairy Lake. A triangular two-mile course was marked with buoys, and “the pits”—where the boats were lowered into the water with cranes, and where mechanics, owners, and drivers tinkered and conferred—were abuzz with manly activity. Hydroplane racing was a big spectator sport in those years. Tens of thousands of people gathered at places like the CNE in Toronto, the Bay of Quinte at Picton, or the Detroit waterfront to watch the boats rip across long stretches of water. Engines roaring and propellers kicking up rooster tails like a bundle of fire hoses, the races were both thrilling and terrifying.

My mother remembers the excitement. For the first time, she was going to watch her father race as Will Braden, one of Canada’s fastest boat racers

The sport was a test of physics. Unlike the boats that came before them, which operated by displacement—pushing water aside—hydroplanes exploited Newton’s third law, using the equal and opposite force of the water being pushed down by the hull to lift the boat off the water. At speed, the boats literally flew, teetering on minimal points of contact with the water: too much lift and the boat could become airborne and flip back on itself; too little and it could “submarine” nose-first into the water. It was extremely precarious; the proprider design that emerged in the 1940s balanced on nothing more than the tips of two wing-like outriggers, called sponsons, and the half-submerged propeller in the stern.

There were two classes of race: “limited” boats, which were subject to restrictions on their length or engine size, and the “unlimiteds,” constrained only by the pocketbooks of their owners. Will Braden excelled in both. In 1951, he became the first Canadian to break 100 miles per hour in his limited boat Ariel IV; in 1955, he took the unlimited Miss Supertest II to an average of 155 mph over the course of a mile, setting another Canadian record.

The 1958 race in Huntsville was to be historic in boat-racing circles. For the first time and by permission of the Queen, the contest for the Duke of York Trophy—established in 1924 by its namesake and the most coveted prize in limited hydroplane racing—was being held outside of England. The race would pit two rival boat-racing nations, Canada and the U.S., each represented by five drivers, against each other. On the Friday before the race, the competing boats were paraded up and down the Toronto waterfront to drum up national fervour.

Standing in the crowd, clutching her Brownie camera, my mother kept her eye trained on her dad’s boat, Ariel V, in the swarm of boats warming up. It was very loud; as in all hydroplane races, the boats were jockeying to hit the starting line at full tilt and precisely the right moment, to break out in front of the pack and cut into open water rather than contending with spray and wake. She heard the loud crack of the starting gun and the boats all took off on the straight-away towards the first turn.

The Duke of York was a 90-mile race, split into three 30-mile heats. During the first heat, on the previous day, the Canadian team had been plagued by mechanical failures. In one boat, the drive shaft had snapped; in another, the engine’s magneto gave out. In Ariel V, the connecting hose on the water scoop had come loose, causing the engine to stall. The American team had prevailed, and the Canadians knew that they needed to capture the top three spots in the second heat if they were to have a chance at the trophy.

In his report on the second heat, Commodore Bob Finlayson—attending as president of the Canadian Boating Federation—called its pace “torrid.” The boats were bunched together so closely that the flags waved to disqualify two boats for their false starts went ignored. The entire course was visible to the crowds scattered across the shore, except for the far turn, which was obscured by a small island. On the fourth lap of the course, Ariel V disappeared behind the island, vying for third place. She didn’t come out on the other side. My mother waited. The two leading boats had already re-appeared but still no Ariel V. She figured it must have “conked out,” as she knew hydroplanes were wont to do. Then she heard a voice over the loudspeaker say something about a delay. Then she heard the word accident. And then she noticed a boat travelling in the wrong direction across the course to the judge’s barge. Her memory then breaks into a series of snapshots: she and her brothers being driven in a boat to a house on the opposite shore; sitting in a strange living room, being served hot chocolate; the sliver of light beneath a closed door off the living room; their mother, stricken, telling them their father had been killed.

That Sunday afternoon the family drove back to their cottage on Lake Muskoka, and the next day to their home on the escarpment near Hamilton, where their father was laid to rest. Life would never be the same. Eventually, they learned what had happened behind the island. An American boat, attempting to pass Ariel V on the inside of the turn, had skidded, clipped Ariel V’s sponson and ridden up over her deck and through the cockpit. The horror was unshakable. But with time, it receded. The Braden children grew up. Some inherited their father’s fascination with design and mechanics, but none raced boats. Fifty years after the accident, the siblings, then in their 50s and 60s, returned to Memorial Park. Mike, the youngest, couldn’t recall a thing. He had been three. Bill, the eldest at 18, remembered standing in the pits as his dad pulled away and said what would be his final words to him: “Can I get you a hot dog?” Norm, 12, had climbed with his friend Wally to the top of the granite outcrop for the best view; passing a pair of binoculars back and forth, they wondered what caused the huge plume of spray that rose behind the island, and why some boats had stalled. Norm remembered walking down to the pits, where he saw something he’d never seen before: one of his father’s fellow racers pulling up to shore, a grown man in tears.

Will Braden was awarded the 1958 Duke of York Trophy posthumously, and in 2014, he was inducted into the Canadian Boating Federation’s Hall of Fame. But for his family, Will’s racing legacy was primarily a story of loss. And then, 62 years after the accident happened, something was found. While spending a pandemic winter in Florida, Mike visited a local vintage race-boat event. The Braden name resonated among the enthusiasts there. One of them even knew where Ariel V was: gathering dust in a barn in upstate New York. In the aftermath of the accident, nobody had given much thought to the boat. A photo widely reproduced in newspaper accounts showed Ariel V, being hoisted out of the water, her deck torn and motor cowling bent backwards “like a wounded gull,” one caption read. But nobody in the family knew where she had gone from there. Mike called Bill, who had recently been forced by declining health from his sprawling rural property into a retirement home in downtown Toronto. With no acres of lawn to mow and no tractor in the garage to fix, he was fulminating. Mike told Bill about Ariel V.

“Buy it,” Bill said. Mike contacted the owner, a hobbyist whose plans to restore and run the boat again had foundered. The owner named a sum. Bill accepted without blinking. The micro universe of hydroplane restorers lit up at the news of Ariel V’s resurrection. One offered to drive her from the barn outside Clayton, N.Y., to his shed near Buffalo. There, Mike retrieved her. On a grey afternoon in June 2022, he pulled up to the American border in his 2002 Toyota Tacoma pickup, towing Ariel V. To the lay person, Ariel V looked like some kind of strange parade float: a flat-nosed whale, painted plum purple. The agent asked Mike if he had papers for that thing on his trailer. Mike explained. “How do you know that was once your dad’s boat?” she asked. Mike pointed to the rudder, still marked by the propeller blades that had mowed over it, and showed her a book about his father’s racing career. “So your father died in that boat?” she asked, and Mike nodded. She waved him through.

Over the following months, the brothers worked together—Bill commandeering from his wheelchair, Mike doing the groundwork—to restore the boat. The collaboration bridged the fifteen years between them, between the son who had served as his father’s right-hand man and the one who only really knew him from photographs. Plunging ever deeper into the world of vintage hydroplane enthusiasts, Mike re-traced Ariel V’s post-accident history and learned how, over the decades, she had been restored, raced, re-painted, and renamed, changing hands seven times before ultimately landing in that barn. Now the challenge was to turn the clock back.

Mike learned, through the grapevine, of a restoration hobbyist in Kemptville, Ont. Tom Keyes grew up in Ottawa, and his love of wooden boats ran deep; he and his sister used to wave at 24 Sussex Drive as they waterskied up the Ottawa River behind their 1932 Port Carling Seabird. Tom had heard about the repatriated Ariel V, so he wasn’t surprised by Mike’s call. Having studied photos from the day of the accident, he knew what he was going for: red deck, white trim, varnished wood sponsons, and block-lettered Ariel V on both sides. He offered to restore her at no cost.

Mike also sourced a 1942 Ford Flathead V8 motor—the same model Ariel V used in the race—in nearby Brockville; to the uninitiated, it looks like a primordial vacuum cleaner crossed with a church organ. Even the propeller that killed Mike’s father has made its way back to him. Will Braden’s friend and teammate Art Asbury, who, on the day of the accident, risked his own life to jump out of his boat and try to save him, kept the propeller; on his death, it passed to his nephew, who in turn offered it back to Mike. With its mangled brass blades, it’s a somewhat morbid artefact—and a symbol of tragic irony. The propeller in fact belonged to Will Braden; ever the sportsman, he had loaned it to his American adversary on the day of the race.

By the summer of 2024, Ariel V should be back to her 1958 self. Bill won’t have the pleasure of seeing her for himself. He died in January, and now lies alongside his father in the Waterdown cemetery. But he died knowing that Ariel V was in good hands. That Mike would ensure she got back in the water. And that a fitting resting place awaited: just down the highway from the old Braden cottage, displayed alongside other relics of Canadian boat racing, honoured in all their bittersweet glory.

Naomi Buck also wrote about how her family cottage acted as a wartime hospital in “Front Lines, Home Fires” (Summer ’15).