There are many traditions at Swarthmore, but there’s one that stands out head and shoulders above the rest in terms of the sheer dedication it takes: the Crum Regatta.

A regatta is a sailing race; the word derives from its Italian counterpart. Crum is our local forest, home to many acres of wildlife, trails, and, yes, a creek/river (depending on who you ask).

You can see where this is heading.

Every year, groups of students sign up to build and race boats down Crum Creek. The “build” aspect is what makes it unique; the boat should be built from scratch. This year’s theme was “recycling.” Though there was one group who went and salvaged a genuine canoe (they were later disqualified), everyone else adhered to a secondary rule that makes the boats far more fun: they should contain no materials that were ever primarily built as flotation devices. A student should be in the boat the entire time, and though people are permitted to be alongside to help steer and push (without which our group of largely extremely inexperienced sailors would be dashed against rocks with unsafe frequency), the vessel should theoretically be able to travel on its own.

Pushing through the crowd at the banks of the creek, beneath the iron monolith of the train tracks, there were ~10 boats lined up (and some scraps of others). A number of registered groups’ boats fell apart when put into the water; though a valiant effort was made with some, these groups for the most part gave up dismayed.

My personal favorite boat was the bicycle boat; though I was unable to get a good look at its construction, through some mechanism, the pedals powered small water paddles. Though there was one other boat with peddle paddles, akin to the swan boats, the bicycle (which was almost certainly rescued from a scrapyard) was a gorgeous touch. Unfortunately, it made the boat a tad bit unsteady; the entire group had to balance it from four sides to stop it from tilting into the freezing water.

Another group who stuck more closely to the recycling theme had a raft that floated entirely on bags of buoyant trash: empty plastic bottles, used aluminum cans, and discarded plastic bags. A piece of what appeared to be plywood topped it off. The sentiment was nice, but it was tragically not quite as fast as others, and plodded compared to the other boats.

One that I would have been terrified to get into removed the risk of the boater falling out entirely; she lay in the boat like a cocoon, in the position one assumes when going down a waterslide, and her teammates pushed her the whole way.

The award for best theme goes to the cross-country team, where four freshman boys had made a ship out of wood designed to look like a Trojan ship, and they were dressed as Spartans. As the cross country team, they had incredible endurance, but not-so-incredible swimming skills; the sailor vastly outpaced his water-borne teammates, leaving them in the dust. His paddle broke in the middle of the race, and so he was reduced to holding the head and using it to propel himself through the water. He was miles ahead of everyone else, except the dreaded actual canoe. Though the paddle broke, his ship never took on water; he finished the race as dry as he had started it (not very, as he was getting splashed pretty consistently).

The team with the actual boat was ahead of the rest (as can be expected, no matter how good, a boat built by hand out of trash is still slower than a mass-produced monster), but something interesting happened on the banks; the spectators started cheering for the Spartans, wanting their hand-crafted boat to overtake the boat of mass consumption. The one remaining Spartan was desperately paddling to try and catch up, his boat strong and sturdy, without a leak to be found.

And they won (by disqualification.) The good guys always come out on top.