On B.C. Day long weekend, a group of seven teenagers built and sailed a homemade, 35-foot wooden raft from Kin Beach in the Comox Valley to Hornby Island.
"I always forget why I want to do it," said Leif Race, the mastermind of the whole project. "I just got so excited about this idea, and just went for it because I thought it'd be cool."
Regardless of the reason, Race and his friends set up shop on Kin Beach and got to work. They started by building frames around their floats, then framed all of that together. They then built a floor, second storey, mast, sail, motor, and of course, a barbecue, piano and trampoline. As the tide rose, so did the raft. After gathering the crew of seven they were on their way.
"We could only go the way the wind was blowing," Race said about the square sail they used on the raft. "We checked in advance to see which way it was blowing and planned where we launched from."
It also informed the destination, which was the south tip of Hornby Island, about 30 kilometres away.
"The fastest we were going was probably eight kilometres per hour," said Solay Schut. "That would be the fastest we were going when were were going through the channel. We were flying through there."
Though nobody was hurt on the trip, the boys said they came rather close to a ferry.
"I was basically asleep, so all the stress was on you guys," Race said to Schut.
Thankfully, they managed to make it by the larger vessel with only a few Moby Dick references yelled at them from passengers on the ferry.
Race and his friends aren't necessarily new to creating wild contraptions. He runs a Youtube Channel called "Cousin Bros" where they've immortalized their adventures. One notable recent one was when they built a cart to travel the train tracks from Courtenay south, with the hopes of getting to Nanaimo. They didn't make it that far.
"I've always thought like that would be so cool," Race said. "It was a blast, just so much fun, and then the video preserves it. You have all this fun, and then it's gone unless you film it."
Looking around Race's backyard, it is easy to tell there are plenty more projects either in the works or at least in mind.
"I wanted to turn my (Volkswagen) Beetle into a boat ... there's lots of ideas. Just cool, out of the box things," Race said. "It all comes back to that original inspiration of just building something huge ...just going camping seems too easy, I want to do something harder than that."
