Cardboard boats

Today we're going to tell one of SouthernKitten's favourite stories, so that she has something fun to read if she gets online in Reno.

A bit of background first, though.

Before the federal election in October of 1993, the last time my party had won my home riding had been in 1940. Back then my grandparents would have been a little youger than I am now, and neither of my parents had been born.

I've been politically active for as long as I can remember. I've done everything from fold pamphlets to manage election campaigns. The summer of 1993 I was almost 18 and I was the kid the local party recruited when something kinda stupid needed to be done.

This is the story of one of those times...

Orillia is situated between two lakes, so there's a lot of recreational boating that goes on. Every summer there's a big boat show at the lakefront park near my parents house. In 1993 a new event was introduced, the cardboard boat race.

The man who was party candidate at that time had been working for about a year at that point, trying to get his name out in the community. If there was an event where he could go out and meet people, he was there. Someone (I don't remember who, but it was probably my mother), came up with the idea that he should participate in the cardboard boat race. Everyone thought this was a splendid idea. We just needed someone dumb enough to build the boat and sail it with him. This is where I came in.

So, I set about building a boat. Now, it should be mentioned at this juncture how much I know about boats, boat design and generally all things nautical. And that is almost nothing. Boats float, and one end is usually pointy. The were the design specifications I was going with.

I recruited my good friend Devilboy to help with this little project. Our first step was to search out the raw materials we'd need for this boat. After a little searching, we found a huge pile of cardboard behind a local furniture store. This was going to be easy! This was going to be the best boat ever! We gathered up as much as we figured we'd need and trucked it back to my parent's house.

Next came the part where we looked at what we had and figured out how to make a boat out of it. The most promising piece of cardboard was a box that was about three feet, by three feet, by six feet. This was great! We'd just cut out one side, but a pointy nose on one end, reinforce it a little, slap on some paint, and voila, boat!

So that's pretty much what we did. We had a few visitors during the process, none of whom thought my creation looked all that much like a boat. I'd try to explain what we were doing, Devilboy would just shrug his shoulders.

After the boat was built, we needed paddles to propel it. Someone (possibly the candidate this time) thought it would just be a whole lot funnier if, instead of using proper paddles, we used a hockey stick and a broom, so some were acquired and off we went.

They day of the event my mom talked a local car dealer into lending us a cubevan to bring the boat to the park, so we used this enormous thing to move my creation the four or five blocks to the park.

We unloaded and got ready for the race. The competition was varied from boats that looked like they'd been built the night before, to ones that looked like teams had spent weeks on them. Ours was somewhere in the middle.

Once the organizers realized who our team was, the event was delayed. I later learned that someone had had to wake up the incumbent candidate so that he could rush down and be a last minute judge. (You don't spend 14 years in office without making a few friends). After a half hour or so delay, a sleepy looking MP staggered down to the park and was introduced as a special judge.

Then came the moment of truth, the race itself.

After the starter's pistol sounded, the candidate and I pushed the boat into the water, and jumped in.

Our first problem was that I rally hadn't accounted for how buoyant cardboard is. The boat, which I had anticipated sinking six inches to a foot into the water, didn't. Instead, maybe an inch was under. This made paddling from any kind of seated position impossible. We had to stand to paddle and anyone who knows anything about simple physics, nevermind boats, will tell you this is a bad idea. This also meant that the boat had no torsional stability and twisted down the middle with every stroke of the paddle. Lastly, brooms and hockey sticks - not good paddles.

The race was to another dock and back. Maybe 150 feet, all told. We got about halfway to the other dock and capsized. My beautiful creation became waterlogged and tore into little tiny pieces shortly thereafter. The candidate and I spent the remainder of the race in the water. The majority of the other boats did not survive either and many, upon disintegration, were found to contain (horror of horrors) wood! Oddly, the officials didn't seem to notice... But really, once you introduce wood, is it really still a cardboard boat? Isn't that more like just a regular kind of boat? But I digress...


We participated in the race a couple more times. Until I started working full time and no longer was home for the summers.

The other years were a lot of fun too.

Maybe some day I'll tell those stories, too.