Ahoy, mateys: Prepare to be cardboarded!
The race was over before it began. The secret was in the engineering.
The latter point probably is not surprising, seeing how it was a contest at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Still, the venue didn't guarantee that everyone would figure out the problem.
The setting was the pool at MIT's Zesiger Aquatic Center. The event was the inaugural Head of the Zesiger Cardboard Boat Regatta, a thinly disguised take-off on the Head of the Charles, which would take place the next day on the real river at the other side of the campus.
The regatta rules stipulated that boats could be made of any thickness of corrugated cardboard, but waxed cardboard carpet tubes and barrels were not allowed. If you look at this rule in an MIT kind of way, the maximum point of flexibility is in the word "thickness." Standard cardboard has two layers, but Ellann Cohen read on the Internet that there's a three-layer sheet you can get at Lowe's.
The trick is, Lowe's doesn't sell it. It's what the store uses to pad shipments, and you have to ask for it out back, which Cohen did at 6:30 one morning.
That wasn't her only advantage.
The design specifications said the boat could be no larger than 3 meters by 1 1/2 meters, and its sides couldn't go above the shoulders of the three passengers, who must paddle one lap in the 50-meter Zesiger pool, using kickboards for oars.
Within these parameters, all but Cohen's team blew a key element - paddling. Cohen's boat, named Ship Happens, was low and narrow, like a slim rowboat. The designers of the other three entries went high and wide for stability, but couldn't get their arms over the sides to paddle well - even if their boat didn't sink immediately, as two did.
And then, perhaps most importantly, there was the white, oil-based paint that kept water from soaking into Ship Happens. But more about that later.
Cohen is a senior engineering major from Alabama who ties her brown hair in a ponytail. For the week leading up to the regatta on Oct. 19, Cohen said, she wasn't getting her homework done because she and her teammates - Becca Oman and Chensi Ouyang - had spent 10 hours cutting and caulking and designing a boat that could hold 900 pounds, "according to my calculations."
By comparison, the Black Pearl had a lot of problems. The team built most of its entry the night before with two-ply cardboard from a U-Haul store, and it looked like a refrigerator box with two outriggers.
The double hull was a good idea, and probably the only thing that kept it afloat during its first heat, but the sides were too high and the team could hardly paddle.
None of this really mattered; without a properly sealed hull, the Black Pearl was just three MIT kids in pirate costumes sinking in the school pool.
They knew this; they just realized it too late.
"We went to the hardware store last night and asked them how we could waterproof cardboard," said Alan Foreman, a 20-year-old junior with dreadlocks sticking out from under his pirate hat. "And they were like, 'Why would you want to do that? Are you from MIT?' "
At that moment, it didn't matter where they were from; they had already passed the time when anything they could put on the cardboard to seal it would dry in time.
In the first heat, Ship Happens took off down the course, while its opponent, Unsinkable II, won the regatta's "Titanic Award" by sinking immediately. In its heat, Black Pearl limped to the finish line as soggy as the bottom of a lake, defeating Conner 4 Pirates.
Standing beside her boat before the finals, Cohen said, with some earned cockiness, "I'm pretty confident."
It was completely justified, as the Black Pearl disintegrated just offshore in the finals, while Ship Happens remained high and dry and cruised to an easy victory.
The design not only clinched the win, but, in the post-race inspection, earned Cohen and her teammates a high compliment on this campus: "Very smart."
rising
falling 