pic: 648 Cardboard Crab Steer Boat 1

[Jeremiah Johnson]

Originally Posted by SgtMillhouse648

Well, we tried it yesterday, and won third place in our division.... It was extremely slow, completing the course in 10 min 50 sec (just as I was ready to pass out!!) , but it took on no water and didn't even think about sinking, even with one of the biggest kids on our team Tyler driving it. I think at Galesburg it will be for display purposes only... It turned on a dime as usual, but was slow. Our "FIRST" Attempt boat from two years ago took first place again for i think the fourth time. All in all it was a very fun competition.

Yup, sure did. 4 wins in 5 races. That's pretty darn good for the very first try. I'm just sad that I didn't think of a way to port the stream of water out the back on the new boat. It moves water like there's no tomorrow but man is it slow because the water isn't forced into an area. I think I may have a fix for that, though.

Anyways, does anyone want to know how "Our 'FIRST' Attempt" went about getting extremely lucky enough to win the race? LOL. Of course you do!

Okay, we started off the first heat pretty good when Ed's (WFFA winning engineer) boat clipped us and we were locked onto it. We were able to pull away a little bit with the superior power that we had, but in that we were also headed towards the inside of the buoy. Our drivers steered right, but over steered and ended up parallel to the stretch, but going the wrong way. In their attempt to turn around both chains apparently came off of the sprocket underwater. Oops. At that time, Ed's boat also became disabled, both chains had come off of theirs also. That allowed the third boat in the race, which was destined for last place, to easily win the heat and move onto the semis. However, Tyler and Mike didn't give up. Unknowingly Mike was pedaling a prop that wasn't moving. By this time they had rounded the first buoy and the wind was taking them towards the second buoy. When they reached the other buoy, Tyler finally realized that he should probably move some water, so he used his hands to paddle and finally get us over the finish line. That's how we moved onto the semi-finals.

In the semis we were paired against a good boat that could have competed with us, but unfortunately his boat (Miss Mudweiser) derailed before he got to the first buoy, leaving us the ability to walk away with a second heat win.

The finals came around and somehow both of our boats had made it into the race (new boat averaged about 12mins per race, but finished all). So did Ed's and another boat from Cedar Rapids, IA. Finally came the fun time to show our stuff, we handily took the W after Ed's boat again died. Side Note: They had won their semifinal match, but lost a propeller in doing so. I don't know why the guy that won the first heat didn't make it into the finals, he ran sub-4:00 races each time.

We have more to be proud of than our 1st and 3rd place finishes. We took home our 5th Spirit Award and Josh got 3rd Place in the instant boat class with his boat "The Brown Floater Deux." He made that boat while the rest were competing.

And so ends an exciting day of cardboard boat racing.

[Alex Cormier]

let's see some pictures!!

[Jeremiah Johnson]

The only picture I know of is here.

It was a full color picture on the inside page of QC Area part of today's newspaper. I was suprised that they put us on there. That would be a photo of Tyler doggypaddling "Our 'FIRST' Attempt" during the heat. As you can see, the article features a nice chunk of team 648 and even mentions the innovativeness of our new boat design.


EDIT: I've found another article in the other daily newspaper here.

More pictures can also be found here.

There's some very good photos of our boats on there, but you can't see them up close without buying them. *tear*