This past Thursday, the PCDS Upper and Middle School piled into the Dady Aquatic Center for one of the most historic boat regattas of all time. With 12 teams racing to beat the teacher boat that has won for five consecutive years, students used new strategies to overcome this behemoth of a victory.
The largest trend in boat construction this year was the use of black storage buckets. Almost every team in the race used this building material, and unfortunately, not all saw much success. Three teams that used these buckets in their boat’s infrastructure collapsed by the end of their races.
One team, consisting of Jake Gregory, Logan Rose, Deven Chhabara, and Gabe Engilman, constructed their boat, S.S. Haritha, fully out of metal. Gregory spent his fall break building the boat with his father and said, “It was a lot of metal cutting and drilling lots of holes. It only took 2 or 3 days to build, but it was definitely time-consuming.” He expressed his disappointment in the team’s performance as they lost to Captain Chaos (Remy Burke, Aarush Atmakuri, Ben Wellnitz, and Dylan Grossman) in the first heat of the regatta.
Luckily for the S.S. Haritha, both teams advanced to the final heat of the race, which featured the top four teams against the notorious B+ teacher boat. The student winners of the past two years, the “Sea Men” (Oliver Wilmink, Miles Wrubel, Cabot Tesky, and Sam Novak), reached the finals this year and worked tirelessly on their boat, not just to win the student race but to win the whole regatta. This team would go on to be victorious in their plan to beat the teachers and end the 5-year winning streak they had fiercely defended. Senior Oliver Wilmink, winning team member, comments, “As my last boat regatta comes to an end, I’m sad to leave the Sea Men legacy behind, but I’m excited for the journey ahead.”
This year’s Boat Regatta has definitely set the energy levels for the Blue and Gold rally, and we are excited to see how next year’s regatta compares to this year’s.
