Ship-Building Competition

From Hawaii, it takes five days at sea to reach French Polynesia, our next port.  What to do with five days at sea?  Viking provides lots of options to keep those days interesting; the one that Vann and I said yes to is a ship-building competition.  

Passengers were invited to form teams to design and build a boat out of repurposed and recycled (read: “scavenged and plundered”) materials found onboard.  The boat has not only to float but also to transport cargo, a bottle of Aquavit, the length of the pool!  

We have a good team, one of whom is an engineer, and he has taken on the basic hull construction.  Vann and I are in charge of the cargo hold: an empty Listerine bottle with its front cut off!  I had a rather flat-ish box, so we sunk the bottle into a contoured hole in the box and decorated it like our pool deck.  Came out pretty cool!

We’ll tie the bottle down with the cords I found in a Papeete fabric shop.  The pool ladder is two drinking straws threaded onto toothpicks sticking out of the deck.  I found the “tile” online and printed it in our business center.  My Honolulu friend Esther will recognize the aqua tissue and what used to be the gift bag she brought when she visited us onboard.  (Sorry Esther, but it had to “take one for the team”.). Will send a picture once all our components are combined.  We still have our doubts about the propulsion system; one can only ask so much of three rubber bands!