Building Cardboard Boats!?! Part 2: The Race

So, I just wrote a post called Building Cardboard Boats!?! Part One. Hopefully you read it, if not I highly suggest you do because this post will make more sense after reading that one. Anyway, the class before the boat race, our boat totally fell apart. The front detached from the rest of the boat, so in a last minute effort to save our boat we used the remaining duct tape and attempted to tape it down. Once, we finished that we had to paint the boat and of course because we were one of the last groups to finish, we got stuck with a big bucket of white paint to share between three groups. I think there were around 8 groups (boats) in our class and the first five groups used up all the colorful spray paint, so our boat had to be white. This was the day before the race and all six of us (three groups = six people) were 100% convinced that we were all going to sink like the Titanic right as we got in the boat.

Flash froward to today, October 22, 2015. The day we all had to get in our boats that were falling apart at the seams to sink in front of an audience. I have this class second period and it is about a five minute walk away and the bus was supposed to leave five minutes after the bell rang. So, I asked my first period teacher if I could leave 5 or so minutes early to put on a bathing suit and get a head start walking over. So, one of the other girls in my class came with me and we ran to the high school. Once, we got there we went into the "Boiler Room" where we had been storing our boats and carried them out to a trailer and then got on the bus. On the bus ride to the pool our teacher informed us that the Ecker students were no longer coming to watch. That was such a relief.

We got to the pool and our audience was quite smaller than excepted, which was the entire middle school. It turned out to be just a few of our parents. We get to the pool and she gives us 10 minutes to make any final adjustments needed. Now we were in full panic mode, before it was just talk about sinking, but now we could actually sink. We made our final adjustments like adding as much duct tape as we could and of course decorating. One of the requirements was that it had to have a theme (ours was tropical), so we added air fresheners that smelled like coconut and fake flowers to make it seem tropical. We also had to have costumes our costumes were bikinis, shell necklaces, sunglasses and flowers in our hair.

Our Decorations

Then the first group went off... Only one boat made it across without sinking. We were now officially terrified. Our teacher told us that only one of us had to go in the boat, but we both decided to go in it anyway. In the words of my partner Megan "Yolo". Then, came the time for our race. The gun (just kidding it was actually a whistle) went off and we went. We start to push the boat in and Megan got fell into the boat before we finished pushing it in. So, then she had to get out and we had to push it all the way in and then she got in again. It was floating with her in it, but now came the real test, would it float when I got in too? To everyone's (including myself and my parents) surprise it floated. We were so shocked that we didn't sink that we didn't start paddling for a few seconds and just sat there yelling WE'RE FLOATING!!!!!!!!!! We then made it about 3/4 of the way there when Megan informed me that the front detached again. We started paddling really fast and made it to the end, before the whole thing filled with water!

Really surprising right?!? I was honestly shocked that we floated, in fact I think we all were. So, that's the very long story of building a boat out of cardboard.

The Race (Photo Courtesy of Eric Oberg)
Teams from left to right: Toby & Ben, Victoria & Sanne and Megan & I