Although none of the 102 vessels launched at the 37th Roth Regatta were seaworthy, many proved themselves to be mostly pondworthy.
Since the first handmade boat left the shores of Roth Pond in 1989, the race has gone like this: Undergraduates at Long Island’s Stony Brook University launch their boats into the water with the simple goal of rowing 200 yards to the other side. Many, if not most, end up capsizing or sinking, their crews splashing and laughing in the pond.
The high wreck rate is due to a core tenet of the beloved and award-winning campus tradition: All qualifying boats must be built from nothing but cardboard and duct tape. This reliably proves to be a humbling yet delightful test for the school’s many budding engineers.
“It's always fun to see people actually make it across and be like, ‘Wow, what did they fortify their boat with to do that?’ But the wipeouts are just as fun as well,” Stony Brook student Mark Owen said on race day last Friday.
Groups of grinning students marched past him, carrying their vessels aloft.
“A little tape and a little cardboard will get you a long way, apparently,” he said.
This year’s theme was video games, so all the ships were painted with various game characters and themes.
To build crowd-favorite "God of War’s" Viking ship, teammates and rugby players Brendan Wisniewski and Jamal Merck estimated they used about 30 rolls of duct tape, and “a lot of time and tears, arguing about how we should tape stuff and how stuff should get cut,” Merck said.
They also trashed their dorm’s garage.
Participants repeatedly reported that engineering majors and assorted creative thinkers were the most valuable teammates, but both Wisniewski and Merck agreed that the biochem major on their team “was the micromanager.”
Several feet away, on a grassy mound serving as the pre-launch area, a white rabbit was let out of a carrier into a Pokémon-themed boat.
“We have a bunny to bless our boat today,” said senior Charlotte Seid, as the bunny, Remy, hopped about their buoyant, liferaft-shaped Pokédex, which had a rampart of carpet tubes affixed to its front.
Remy did not participate in the race.
Next to them, in the same shady corner of the mound, Team Kirby gathered around their pink, star-covered vessel, which was adorned with the pink, round Nintendo character’s face.
“We stayed up until like 3 taping up the boat,” Kazi Abthahi said. “But it’s rewarding though, cause it looks really cool.”
The annual Roth Regatta draws hundreds of onlookers to Stony Brook University’s campus, which is the largest public university campus in New York state. But it began as a very small affair.
“One day, my friends and I are just coming back from the library studying, back to Roth Quad where we all lived, and I just said, ‘We should do something with this pond,’” Stony Brook alum Curt Epstein said in a phone interview.
Epstein and his friends were inspired by a Mountain Dew commercial on TV at the time that featured a cardboard boat race, and decided to create their own: The Roth Quad Yacht Club.
Next, they set about creating a proof-of-concept boat, collecting what eventually amounted to $200 from various dorms for materials, and securing the school’s blessing.
The first Roth Regatta took place in 1989, and involved 10 boats and a handful of onlookers.
“The most improbable thing in my mind is not that we did it, but that the university actually allowed this,” Epstein said. “ That still to this day boggles my mind. There's any number of reasons and any number of people that could have just said no, and that would have been the end of it.”
Nearly four decades later, the Regatta has become a quirky point of university pride. The rules drawn up by the Roth Quad Yacht Club in ’89 remain largely the same, including that there are still two-person “speedster” boat races and four-person “yacht” boat races.
But other elements have changed: The pond is much cleaner, and the event has grown enormously.
Today, the school also maintains a stash of waders for the students who help get the boats out of the shallow pond after each heat. The boats are then promptly thrown into a sanctioned dumpster.
Also, there’s merch, while it lasts.
“We had over 2,000 pieces, all of it gone in under an hour,” said Alleyna Charoo, a member of Stony Brook's Undergraduate Student Government, while firing a T-shirt gun across the pond at a gaggle of jumping undergrads. “People were lining up three hours before it started for it.”
There was also a waitlist to compete this year after last year’s race dragged on a bit too long.
The race's competitive aspect, though, is almost an afterthought.
“I think it brings everybody together, you know? Everybody's cheering each other on,” said Ronkonkoma resident and Stony Brook alum June Grippo, who loves the Regatta so much she returns to campus to watch it. “They're, you know, excited for each other and everybody laughs at their mistakes. It's just a good time.”
Many Regatta attendees began wandering off before the winners were even announced. After all, it was finals week.
