Rain Gutter Regatta

The past few years the Rain Gutter Regatta has been a church event for us.  The 8-11 year old girls have participated along side our cub scouts.  There has been a big picnic and everyone has been involved.  This year we are going to have it be a pack meeting activity.  We are also trying something different with the boats this year.  Normally we use the BSA boats, but to save some money we are going to try out soap boats this year.  I'll let you know how that goes when we get there!

We used to just use the actual rain gutters for our regatta.  When the BSA switched over to the trimarans though the gutters were just a little too skinny.  Handy husband to the rescue again!  My husband built our current gutters from scratch.  He utilized the sides of our old gutters, some plastic lining, some wood, screws, and some caulking.  And voila!  New gutters that fit the trimarans perfectly.  They are slightly bigger and bulkier than the old gutters, but they are also more stable.  For setting the gutters up we use some saw horses my husband and the Webelos made during one of their activities.  They needed to make something useful and boy are these useful!  Here is our set-up:

When it comes to trophies the Google Sketch-up comes out again, along with the milling machine, and some paint.  When it came to painting the backs of the trophies I thought of a real boat race.  I used that as my inspiration.  A boat race starts in the day, can run through sunset and into the evening.  Hence the morning, sunset, and night trophies for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd places.  These also are made to be display trophies.  So there are grooves for the trimaran to sit in.  Then the boat is sailing in front of the sky.  We will have to tweak our trophies some this year since we are using different boats, but we will keep them as similar as possible.  

The last issue we had when it came to the regatta is what do you do with all those boats?  Seriously, what do you do with them?  Well if you are married to my husband you have a dry dock built. The dry dock was built using random pieces of wood that we had in the garage.  Thus our dry dock was born.  It can fit 16 on the top and the bottom shelf for a total of 32 boats.  Much better than the previous year when we threw them all in a plastic bucket!  For storage purposes with the removal of a couple screws in the side panel it all compacts down.

Pre Dry Dock Days

Post Dry Dock Days