This just in. Intrepid waterborne speedster Jerry Gregson outraced a tidal wave caused by a volcanic eruption and survived! Not only that, but he set a world speed record doing it. How’s that for having a nice day at the racecourse?
What’s that, you say? No one has ever outraced a tsunami in a hydroplane?
Well, there is a first time for everything. In my new novel Rainier Erupts! just such a thing happens because, well, I wrote it that way. I just combined a few facts I know well and came up with a storyteller’s dream.
Fact: My brother Jerry Hopp and his son Greg Hopp are champion race drivers in the super-hot field of Grand Prix Hydroplane racing. They just set the world speed record in their “Happy Go Lucky” race boat a few weeks ago, at over 170 miles per hour!
Fact: They both drive shiny yellow boats, the GP-12 and the GP-15, and each has more race trophies than they know what to do with. So I combined their names to come up with the fictitious character Jerry Gregson. Pretty clever, huh?
Fact: Rainier is not a dormant volcano. It is an active one. Sure, it’s been lazy for the last five hundred years or so, but give it a little more time and it’ll prove how active it is. And past eruptions have flooded nearby valleys with hot lava and mudflows that surged into nearby lakes and Puget Sound, causing tidal waves.
Hence my fact-based saga of a race driver in a near-death experience with a tidal wave on Seattle’s hydroplane racecourse.
If you can’t bring yourself to believe it, then it might help if you got a copy of the book, just released last week as a paperback and in Kindle, Nook, iBook, and other versions. Click this LINK and it will take you to where you can grab a copy at the still-reduced price of $1 off. Hurry. Like the lull in Rainier’s record of eruptions, this offer won’t last much longer.
My thanks go out to Chris Denslow, who took the picture of Jerry flying over the water in his race boat. The snapshot of the mountain is mine.
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Happy Reading!
-Tom
