By Anita Miller
San Marcos — When A.J. Griffin hears the old stories about the origin of the Texas Water Safari, he just has to chuckle.
That’s because the 83-year-old Hays County resident says he pretty much invented what has come to be known as the World’s Toughest Boat Race.
Griffin showed up at this newspaper’s office on Wednesday, just hours before the 100-hour limit ran out for teams to reach the Safari finish line. With him he had a picture frame with two yellowed clippings from the Victoria Advocate.
Both dispute the rumor, corrected at texaswatersafari.org, that the race started on a bet between Frank Brown and Bill “Big Willie” George.
Those two men did make the first successful voyage from what was then Aquarena Springs, down the San Marcos and Guadalupe Rivers to San Antonio Bay and then to Corpus Christi.
But that was in 1962. Griffin’s contributions began in the 1950s.
Back then he lived in Seadrift, where the race now ends, at a time when “everybody was a fisherman” and most of the town’s 500 or so residents had boats.
As a member of the Seadrift Citizens Club, Griffin was charged with bringing attention to the small coastal town, and one of the ideas he came up with was a Guadalupe River boat race.
He contacted the Chamber of Commerce in Cuero, located on the Guadalupe below its confluence with the San Marcos River, and secured sponsorship for the race’s start.
What happened next was “The first Cuero to Seadrift motor boat race,” he recalls, “and it was a disaster.” The big boats couldn’t portage around log jams, though “several of the smaller boats got through and finished.”
The next year, Griffin said, the race was changed to outlaw motors, relying instead on human muscle as the Safari does today. Plans were to also expand the race, which is when the finish line was moved to Corpus Christi. “They offered boats, motors and fishing rods for prizes, and Seadrift got some credit,” he says.
“The first year was a great success but the second year was a disaster. The weather got so bad and the bay so rough.” So many boats got into trouble on the bay crossing that Griffin enlisted shrimp boats “to rescue people as boats cratered and sunk and broke in two.”
After that, the finish line returned to Seadrift.
Griffin is now the sole surviving member of what was the Seadrift Citizens Club. He moved to Hays County after retiring from Union Carbide, where he worked with some who still enter the Safari most every year, including Roger Zimmerman.
Griffin also accomplished another of the goals the citizen club set out — finding a physician to set up practice in Seadrift.
The two yellowed clippings are about all he has to remind him of those early races, as his home was destroyed by Hurricane Carla in 1961.
