Competitors Try a Walk on the Wet Side : Engineering: Designing buoyant shoes is not impossible. But using them and keeping an even keel almost is, as event at University of San Diego shows.

They walked on water Saturday at the University of San Diego.

Not that students and faculty did anything sacrilegious at the independent Catholic institution.

Rather, their attempts to traverse the 25-meter width of an Olympic-size pool were all in good, applied scientific fun, part of a practical engineering problem posed for students:

Design human-powered buoyancy shoes and propel yourself across the pool.

Sponsored by the department of electrical engineering, the competition was to show students that there is more to their discipline than just theory and number crunching. Sister Sally Furay, the university’s provost, even came up with the contest name: “Walk on Water.”

Organizer Michael Morse, a USD engineering professor, claimed that the event attracted more spectators than the nearby America’s Cup has so far, and no one argued his second claim: USD’s contest was run in less-polluted waters.

The dozen entries ranged from ordinary to extraordinary, and all cost competitors $75 or less in parts. There was no limit on creativity, however--or, for that matter, on non-university entries.

Undergraduate Ron Montehermoso’s “USS Never Sail” proved prophetic: His contraption of two inner tubes attached to square Styrofoam floats was a late scratch because the left tube blew up.

Most entrants favored variations on a common theme: Styrofoam floats with some sort of Plexiglas keel or fin arrangements underneath.

“The buoyancy part wasn’t the hard part,” undergraduate Dominic Pimental said. “Rather, the hard part is how to make yourself go” across the water.

The “Two Shoes” entry he and four classmates came up with got them about a third of the way across the pool before Pimental lost forward motion and his legs went out from under him.

But that was better than the faculty entry of professors Kathleen Kramer and Ernie Kim. Wearing plastic-wrapped cardboard shoes in the shape of Big Ben clock towers, their “Das Boot” claimed the honor of quickest dunk, with Kramer splashing down within five seconds of push-off.

“Piranha Dancer,” a non-USD entry, took first place. Ann Shipley skimmed over the glistening surface twice in under two minutes, with her best time 1 minute, 19 seconds.

Shipley, an engineer at UC San Diego’s Center for Astrophysics and Space Science, teamed with engineer Joth Layton of Rohr Inc., a Chula Vista-based aerospace firm.

The pair came up with two purple Styrofoam boards--”sort of fancy boogie boards”--ribbed on the bottom and augmented with a small “secret Plexiglas keel.”

When Shipley moved forward with her “shoes,” the underside ribs and fins pushed her shoes slightly out of the water. When she moved her foot back, the fins pushed against the water, propelling her across.

Daniel Nguyen and Richard Nguyen (no relation) found that fellow student Tarek Derbas miscalculated slightly with an offbeat design of three surfboards strapped together, to be balanced with one foot while the other foot became a human “fin” to paddle in the water.

Daniel tightroped for several yards before toppling sideways into the drink.

“The ultimate lesson is that the joy of all of this is in the process,” a grinning Richard Nguyen said.