Physics Boats Day

By Alex Chiang, Staff writer 

On Saturday, May 30, hundreds of boats embarked on their christening voyage, captained not by sailors but scholars.  Physics students from almost every school in the District met at Fountain Valley High School to sail their homemade boats across the swimming pool.   

The physics boat race is a long-standing tradition in the HBUHSD. “We’ve been doing it since I started teaching here,” says physics teacher Mr. Larson. “That’s a long, long time.”   

Physics students took what they have learned about buoyancy and a pinch of common sense to create their own boats out of nothing but wood, some butcher paper, paint, glue, and a whole lot of prayer. In fact, seniors Victoria Yee and David Mendoza aptly named their boat “Hope It Floats.” 

“It’s a little bit of both teacher instruction and student creativity,” says Larson, “We leave a lot of the artistic design up to the students. I remember the year the movie Titanic came out, there were many Titanics. A lot of them sank too.” 

But boat building is not all fun and games. Many physics students faced huge challenges in the construction of their boats.  

“It took us about a month and a half [to build]. We worked about once a day on the weekends,” junior Jason Schwartz recalls. “We didn’t really know what we were doing. It was pretty much a free for all.” 

“It was a huge obstacle not being able to use tape or nails,” says senior John Albert. “The boat must have taken me a good six hours or longer.” 

Juniors Cindy Luu and Annie To recollect a similar story.   

“It was pretty fun, but we didn’t know what to do. We pretty much built a big rectangle,” says Luu. “A lot of the construction was based on things we couldn’t use, so we had to find alternatives to the materials.” 

Their hard work paid off, though, as the young physicists were able to sail, or sink, their creations.   

“We made it!” rejoiced To, “But it sank at the end.” 

After the boat race, many students took their boats behind the gym and passionately smashed them to pieces with baseball bats.

Check out the photo gallery here.