With names such as the Titantic and the Edmund Fitzgerald, the cardboard boats entered in last weekend`s Waukegan Port District boat race didn`t have a lot going for them. Nevertheless, all but one of the eight handmade vessels made it across the finish line. Only Cooler By The Lake, piloted by Jerry Meyer of Waukegan, overturned and sank.
”We should have named it Cooler In The Lake, boat builder Bob Crombie joked after the race. The race was won by Augi Hernandez of Kildeer, who paddled his way across the finish line well ahead of his nearest competitor, Edward Leslie, in a boat named Corrugated. Hernandez`s boat, the Barney Express, was built with help from his friends Dugan Keene of Lake Forest and Jeff Zaun of Libertyville. ”They built it. All I did was paddle,” Hernandez noted after his victory.
Smaller and sleeker than the other boats, the Barry Express was modeled after a kayak and had a tightly rolled cardboard tube that ran down the center of the boat`s interior, from stem to stern. ”That kept it from bending,”
designer Keene explained later.
Rather than using paddles, like the rest of the racers, Hernandez propelled his boat with his hands. ”We thought that would be better. Using a paddle would have been too awkward; it might have made it tip,” Keene added. The boat builders all received cardboard, tape and plastic with which to construct the boats before the race. The designs they came up with varied considerably. One resembled a raft, others looked like canoes, and a couple just appeared to be floating cardboard boxes. One boat was built to look like an aircraft carrier, complete with tiny cardboard planes sitting on the deck. The boat race was just one event in the weekend-long Harbor Daze celebration sponsored by the Waukegan Port District. Other activities included conventional boat races, jet ski shows, shoreline cruises, tours of the water plant and a demonstration of the Coast Guard`s rescue helicopter.
