Village of Kings Point native Stuart Hayim set a new record for navigating a powerboat around Long Island on Tuesday, with a 271-mile voyage that took him 2 hours and 11 minutes to complete at speeds of up to 152 miles per hour.
“It’s the last race,” Hayim said while surrounded by friends and family on a dock at the Manhasset Bay Marina in Port Washington.
“It’s 25 years of fun racing and now this is probably the end of it,” he added. “It’s a little bittersweet.”
But for the 65-year-old Hayim, a father of four now living in Sands Point, it was the reason behind Tuesday’s race, which he said really served as a cause for celebration.
Along with shattering the previous record for navigating a powerboat around Long Island by 54 minutes, Hayim said his final race raised nearly $30,000 for the Don Monti Memorial Foundation.
Hayim, a cancer survivor who was treated at North Shore University Hospital’s Don Monti Division of Oncology in Manhasset, said his quest to raise money for cancer research has been ongoing since he was diagnosed with lymphoma in 1979.
And it was a meeting with Tita Monti, who along with her husband Joseph, started the Don Monti Memorial Foundation after their 16-year-old son died from myeloblastic leukemia that began his philanthropic and powerboat racing endeavors.
“When I was sick (Tita) walked down, sat on my hospital bed and said ‘I lost my son. I’m not going to lose you,’” Hayim recalled. “We’re raising money for them. It was 32 years ago. So, they helped me and now we help them help the next people.”
The owner of Ferrari Maserati dealerships in Long Island, Manhattan and Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., Hayim said he hopes to raise additional money to benefit the Don Monti Memorial Foundation’s work with cancer patients. He said a fundraiser for the organization is scheduled to be held later this summer at Ferrari Maserati of Long Island in Plainview.
“We should get over $100,000 when we’re done,” Hayim said. “I think so. I hope so.”
Using a 42-foot Marine Technology powerboat with twin 1,350 horsepower Mercury engines, Hayim and racing partner John Tomlinson broke the previous record of Joe Cibellis and Joe Sgro – who navigated their boat around Long Island in 3 hours and five minutes in 2011.
The first people to set a record for navigating a boat around Long Island were Bill Sirois and Fred Kiekhaefer.
In 1968, the pair set the record at 3 hours and 59 minutes, which held until 1989 when Hayim made the voyage in 3 hours and six minutes.
During his racing career, Hayim won 83 powerboat races, three national championships and four world championships over a 10-year period.
Hayim said all of the money he has won from powerboat racing, which totals “hundreds of thousands of dollars,” was donated to the Don Monti Memorial Foundation.
“It feels good to be back here,” Hayim said on Tuesday. “The ocean wasn’t fun. The ocean got rough. From here to Montauk, it was a swimming pool. It was easy, fun and then the ocean got rough. With each wave I kept watching the miles tick away.”
Hayim’s powerboat, which is named “Recovery” and is adorned with stickers of sponsors who donated money for his race, navigated a course that began and ended at the Manhasset Bay Marina in Port Washington.
After leaving the Marina, Hayim said he traveled northeast past the Orient Point and Montauk Point lighthouses. He said the course then went southwest past Freeport, the Rockaways and Brooklyn.
During the race, Hayim and Tomlinson passed underneath the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge before passing Governors, Roosevelt and Rikers islands.
The record-breaking race ended with Hayim and Tomlinson going under the Whitestone and Throgs Neck bridges before again entering the Long Island Sound.
“I knew we’d break the record,” said Tomlinson, who resides in Miami, Fla. “It was just a matter of would the boat finish and not have a problem and break down. I knew the boat was capable of breaking the record.”
Tomlinson said it was a privilege to race with Hayim.
“I’ve know Stuart for a long time now,” Tomlinson said. “I actually worked on a lot of his race boats out of our shop, raced against him and Joey Impresscia for many years and helped them out for many years.”
Although Hayim’s racing career may be over, he said he will continue to “pay back” the Don Monti Memorial Foundation by helping to raise money for the organization.
“This is easy,” Hayim said of this week’s race. “This is the fun part.”
