The Origin of the Stern Squirt

From Davey Hearn: 

Larry Norman, Willy B Roberts, John Mason, iirc, it was in the Model Basin in January or February of 1977, when we had the Max II C1s on the water after Jon Lugbill and Bob Robison and I had finished the prototype plug and mold and built our boats, that I remember Bob might have had a leaky skirt or cockpit rim and had ended up with some water in his boat and noticed that he could pivot turn his C1 in a way that we had not known before. 

So we might have added a bit of water to our boats to see what we could do. Kent Ford was there too. Later designs pivoted better without added water and on eddy lines. The UltraMax was the first boat that could do bow pivots, as Jon and Bob discovered while warming up at Jonquiere WC 1979. 

The high ends rule went away for the 1973 season, as shown by the difference between the ‘72 Hahn used at the Munich Games on the Augsburg Eiskanal course, and the ‘73 Hahn used at the 1973 Muotathal WC, with the flattened deck, but still a fairly high volume boat.

From Phil Coleman:

Bobby Alexander did an unintentional stern pivot just upstream of swimmer's hydraulic in 76 and told me about it and tried to do it again and couldn't. I did a couple in the spring of 78 and started thinking about what the deal was. In May of 78 I had my epiphany in Tier Drop rapid on the Cheat where I leaned the wrong way coming into an eddy and stood the boat up at about a 45 degree angle and was shot forward. Like a seed or a bar of soap leaving your hand when you squoze it. That was when I called it Squirting. The boat was a Sahna. In 79 at Jonquiere, Lugbill, Hear and Robison were standing their Max C's up vertical in the warm-up pool above the course. In the winter of 79-80 I was now doing squirt turns WITH DUFEK STROKES , not stern pries.

How to Stern Squirt: