Countywide : Boat Makers Stretch Their Imaginations

Cal State Fullerton art student Brandy Flower clutched his plastic boat, waiting to race.

“I’ll probably win,” he said Thursday as the 7th Annual Rubber Band-Powered Boat Race was about to get underway. With figures of Beavis and Butt-head sitting atop the rubber band-powered craft, how could he not?

But when the time came, a Bart Simpson Butterfinger boat cruised smoothly down the 0.004-nautical-mile lane as Flower’s boat and two other boats weaved, bobbed or drifted sideways.

The Butterfinger’s builders, Rhodri Lamba, Kenneth Lim and Joven Orozco--three cousins and Cal State Fullerton art students--grinned and gave out real Butterfingers to the assembled students and faculty members after the race.

And so it went at the Rubber Band-Powered Boat Race, which participants said is held each year to celebrate the onset of spring break and give faculty and students a sense of camaraderie. Despite threatening skies and cold winds, the two-hour event at Cal State Fullerton went on with cheers and friendly jeers as racers watched their boats, for the most part, go nowhere.

“I didn’t win,” observed Flower afterward. Neither did Apollo Sison’s craft, despite his boat’s complicated power system of fuse, spring and rubber band and the figures of Beavis and Butt-head cutting off Barney the dinosaur’s head on a guillotine.

He hoped, however, to win in the Grossest Boat category.

At the annual ritual, about 60 students, faculty members and visitors tested their engineering skills with boats of foam, wood, plastic and in one case, cinder block. Each boat had to be powered by a 28-inch-long rubber band. Most adhered to the theme of “Barney, Bart and Beavis and Butt-head,” incorporating likenesses of the famed pop culture icons into their crafts. Winners received gift certificates from the Art Emporium and free food from various restaurants.

“It lets students and faculty cut back and make fun of each other without the pressure of a classroom setting,” said art Professor Bryan Cantley, who assigned the students in his 3-D art class to enter the race as a project. And, he added, it was educational as well, forcing art students to use engineering skills and imagination.

While most used their rubber bands attached to model plane propellers as motors for their boats, Mike Jephcott used a catapult to throw his boat into the water--at the finish line. He won the Farthest From Legal award.

“If you can’t win, cheat,” observed art department staffer Michael Quinn. “Art has no rules.”

Some participants used their boats to make a statement. The boat of Tom Herberg, an art professor from Mt. San Antonio College, was a wooden tray holding a stack of paperwork adorned with pieces of red tape. “It’s the SS Administrative Vessel,” he said.

When asked what the boat race meant to him, he said, “Futility.”

His boat promptly sank.