The Road to Baltimore
(May 4)
We drove to Baltimore in two vehicles –
Bill’s (which carried the sculpture) and a 12
passenger van we rented for team
transport. Yes, believe it or not, our
Two-Person, Human-Powered, Row-Driven,
Canoe-Based, All-Terrain Vehicle is
disassemble-able and one car
transportable! We decided to put the dragons
in the back of the van though, to give them a
little more protection.
We left Worcester mid-morning and arrived
around lunchtime in Waterbury, CT, where 4 out of
5 of the remaining travelers were. The last
one casually strolled in a couple hours
later. But, I kid – we knew he wasn’t getting
there until some time after 2... We got to
make productive use of the time by helping Meg
work on our race costumes.
We arrived at the condo we rented in
Baltimore around 10pm. While the drivers were
shooed away to their beds to recover from the long
day, the rest of us worked on costumes and
prepared for the next day’s events until the wee
hours of the morning… except for Mike B, who
bravely ventured out into the late Baltimore
evening to buy us supplies, with nothing more than
a bike, a backpack, and a map in his mind.
Race Day (May 5)
In the morning, we split into two teams
depending on our duties. There was the set
that assembled the sculpture and took care of all
the pre-race checks, and the set that took care of
non-sculpture logistics such as packing food,
water, and the BribeMaster 3000s (pictured
below).
So, how did it go? We knew that the row
drive was not going to be efficient, but we still
did better than we had expected! We got about
7 miles before our show-stopping (and only, I
believe) failure, and it wasn’t caused by any of
the SNEW engineered row drive components. We
lost the top set of drive gears a short distance
from the water portion of the course. We were
able to jam it back on, and it stayed on long
enough for us to complete the water portion, even
allowing us to row up the ramp, out of the
water. (This is an area most sculptures have
a very hard time with, so we were pretty
proud.)
That was as far as it would take us, though.
After exiting the water and pulling out of
the way of the other vehicles, the gear fell off
again after a light brush by a pit crew member.
Since we didn't have a good plan for
long-term pushing, we chose to stop as a team at
the water area rather than having to leave people
behind to watch over the equipment (bikes, etc)
we'd have to ditch to push the sculpture to the
finish.
We plan on seeing how much weight we can
remove from the sculpture and heading back some
time in the future to be the first row driven
sculpture to finish the race.