Students in electrical circuits lab apply the fundamental principles and mathematical techniques used to analyze and model analog and digital circuits.

This is the third story in our series honoring Women’s History Month and this year’s theme, “Women Inspiring Innovation Through Imagination: Celebrating Women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.”

Picture an engineer. Do you see a guy wearing a hardhat and a tie? Maybe a pencil rests behind his ear as he examines a blueprint. If you look at the list of graduates from Sweet Briar’s Margaret Jones Wyllie ’45 Engineering Program, you will find quite a different picture. There’s Sarah Smiley ’09, managing aviation and aerospace projects at General Electric, Christina Johnson Pappas ’08, researching thermo fluidics at the University of Virginia, and MaryAnne Haslow-Hall ’11, improving the manufacturing process at Glad. Talent and hard work earned them the title of “engineer,” but it was the program’s faculty, the advisory board and its namesake, Margaret Jones Wyllie ’45, who made engineering possible at Sweet Briar in the first place.

In 2002, an award from the National Science Foundation kicked off the planning stages for the program at a time when only one other women’s university, Smith College, offered an engineering curriculum. Hank Yochum was hired to teach physics that same year. Today, Yochum is also professor of engineering and serves as the department’s director.

“I don’t think anyone could have imagined that it would turn into what it did,” he says about the thriving program, which offers an ABET-accredited degree.

A hands-on degree

The first official class of engineering majors entered Guion Science Center in 2005, and Pappas was the first Sweet Briar student to graduate with a B.S. in engineering science in 2008. Today she is a Ph.D. candidate in the mechanical and aerospace engineering program at the University of Virginia.

Pappas was no stranger to research when she started at UVa. At Sweet Briar, it’s common for engineering students to participate in faculty research projects from day one. Beginning in her first year, Pappas worked on collaborative projects, including radio astronomy with physics professor Scott Hyman. Today, she calls her undergraduate time an “incubation period” that prepared her for a career in research.

Sweet Briar’s “Explore” programs draw high school women from around the country to spend a week or weekend being an engineering student.

Haslow-Hall had a similar experience. She spent her second summer in college drawing up plans for a low-cost prosthetic hand with associate professor Scott Pierce. By her junior year, she was machining a partial prosthesis that would be her research focus for the rest of her undergraduate career.

Haslow-Hall believes Sweet Briar’s small program afforded more hands-on experience than she would have had elsewhere. And seeing projects from inception proved important, because she now regularly implements new designs and ideas at Glad Manufacturing in Amherst.

Lab hours and experiential learning are central to the program. Doing real work is critical for engineering students, Yochum says, because the undergraduate degree is the professional degree. Many Sweet Briar alumnae pursue advanced study, but those who don’t typically find jobs in the field as soon as they graduate.

Haslow-Hall credits the Technology and Society course for familiarizing her with project development. The class exposes students to social issues that influence how engineering solutions are designed and implemented. It’s one of the core requirements for the degree and is offered either from a regional or a global perspective. In Haslow-Hall’s class, students designed and built tools that address specific needs of employees with disabilities at Lynchburg Sheltered Industries, a local nonprofit manufacturing company.

It was important to Yochum and Pierce that the students visited LSI and worked with the individuals who would be using the devices. They wanted to show the students that, behind all the math, what engineers really do is help solve problems for others.

“If you didn’t solve their problem, even if you thought you did a good job, you didn’t,” Yochum explains.

Haslow-Hall and Smiley worked together on the LSI collaboration. Their team designed a kit that aided workers assigned to assemble a unit from several component parts. Because the task requires considerable dexterity, the team identified the step as “rate-limiting” for disabled workers, who get paid based on productivity. Their design not only speeded the process for the worker’s benefit, it won third place in a workplace innovation design contest.

“Our students … helped a number of workers make more money, which is a pretty powerful thing to do as a college student,” Yochum says.

Some years, Technology and Society students go out of the country to fulfill the course requirements — helping to address the challenge of an intense curriculum that often makes a semester or year abroad difficult for engineering students. In recent years, classes have traveled to Brazil and Guatemala.

Moving past “male-dominated”

After graduating, Smiley entered a master’s program in engineering management at Dartmouth College, where she was one of seven women in her class of 50. Most engineers will admit that the field is male-dominated, Smiley says. Today she is a quality engineer in aviation and aerospace at GE. Her company, like many others, is interested in diversifying their employee pool, but women engineers are still not the norm, she says.

Bethany Brinkman, who joined Sweet Briar’s engineering faculty in 2010, agrees. “I don’t see any barriers that I had to overcome just because I’m a woman, and that’s wonderful,” she said. “Certainly the barrier right now is that we don’t have many women in [engineering].”

The annual Cardboard Boat Regatta is part of an introductory course in engineering design that is open to all interested students.

According to the most recent data published by the Society of Women Engineers, women represented about 20 percent of engineers in 2008. Sweet Briar is trying to increase that number. Since the report was released, the College has hosted several “Explore Engineering” weekends and weeklong summer camps for high school girls.

“Engineering is this nebulous field where you don’t quite know what people do,” Yochum explains. The program is meant to dissipate misconceptions about engineering, especially the idea that all engineers must be math geniuses.

The core message Yochum hopes to get across is that “engineers help people. Engineers help society. And if you become an engineer then you can help other people.”

About 20 percent of the “Explore Engineering” program’s participants end up enrolling at Sweet Briar, including Pappas’ younger sister, Amanda Johnson ’14. This past spring, four of the majors who worked as “Explore” mentors were once participants themselves. Whether they choose Sweet Briar or not, these high school students are more likely to consider engineering as a career — simply because they tried it out.

Seeking to promote such opportunities for more high school women, AREVA, an international nuclear engineering firm, has become the title sponsor of the Explore Engineering program for the summer and fall of 2013 and spring of 2014.

“In engineering, what you bring to the table besides your technical training turns out to be pretty important,” Yochum said, adding that companies such as AREVA recognize how important it is to have people from all kinds of backgrounds contributing a diverse range of potential solutions to a problem.

This mindset has not always prevailed in engineering, though. In the early 1940s, Margaret Jones Wyllie ’45 wanted to study engineering, but found few options available to her. Not many programs accepted women and no women’s college offered the degree at the time.

“Women were not wanted or trusted to be engineers,” she told Virginia Business magazine.

Wyllie pursued chemistry at Sweet Briar instead, but her interest in engineering remained strong. In 2010, she and her late husband, Jesse, donated $3 million to the engineering department to support scholarships, lab equipment, the Technology and Society projects and more. Although the Wyllies had made smaller donations earlier in the department’s history that were critical to its development, the program’s name recognizes the 2010 endowment.

The donation allows more Sweet Briar students and graduates to contribute to the changing face of the very field that kept Wyllie out. And they are doing just that, whether it’s through their work, through research, or through community involvement. Yochum says he is impressed by “the extent to which students rise to the occasion,” and encouraged by the positive feedback he gets from internship supervisors. Watching his students talk confidently about engineering to high school girls is icing on the cake.

“It always makes us really proud,” he says.

— Amanda Keener ’08

Des’rae Davis, 16, of Houston, and Madi Hurley, 17, of McKinney, Texas, work together on a drawing machine during Sweet Briar College’s Explore Engineering Design camp in July 2012.

AREVA Inc. has given $35,000 to be the title sponsor of the AREVA Explore Engineering program at Sweet Briar College in the summer and fall of 2013 and spring of 2014.

Although AREVA has been a partner of the College’s Margaret Jones Wyllie ’45 Engineering Program in the past, it has not previously underwritten the four-year-old Explore Engineering series, and will be the first sponsor to do so.

Sweet Briar hosts three Explore events a year for high school girls, including a weeklong residential camp that immerses the students in both the college experience and the possibilities of an engineering career. The summer program and spring and fall weekend mini-camps are hands-on, team-based and structured to emphasize creativity, problem solving and design principles.

So far, more than 200 high school girls from across the country — including several from the Lynchburg area — have attended one or more of the camps. For AREVA, sponsoring the program is an exceptional opportunity to serve the community where it works. And it makes good business sense.

“As AREVA faces a shortage of qualified engineers, this program is a great fit for our workforce development strategy because it addresses both the STEM education and diversity gaps in our country,” said Gary Mignogna, AREVA Inc. senior vice president of engineering and projects. “By supporting local STEM programs like this one, we’re ensuring the future success of not only our company, but of our region as a whole.”

Sweet Briar is one of only two women’s colleges in the U.S. to offer an ABET-accredited engineering degree. The curriculum focuses on mechanical engineering while engaging students in opportunities to improve the quality of life for others through engineering design.

Wyllie Program director Hank Yochum notes that beyond the personal rewards of a challenging career, the prospect of making a difference in people’s lives attracts many students to the profession. Engineering impacts so many areas — medicine, transportation, and food and energy production, to name a few. Yet there is some truth to the adage that today’s solutions can become tomorrow’s problems, Yochum says, so it’s important to bring different perspectives to bear in the process.

“We need a wide range of creative ideas from engineers and scientists,” Yochum says. “I firmly believe that a more diverse group of engineers will come up with better designs. A more diverse group may also think more thoughtfully and holistically about the potential impacts of engineering and technology on society. With the Explore program, we seek out students who are underrepresented in the field to encourage them to pursue engineering.”

To that end, the Explore series has been effective, with 20 percent of participants matriculating to Sweet Briar’s Wyllie program. Combined with those who choose to study engineering elsewhere, it can make significant contributions to widening the pool of highly qualified graduates entering the job market.

“AREVA’s investment in educating women engineers in and for Central Virginia represents the best kind of partnership between business and higher education for the good of the community,” said Jo Ellen Parker, president of Sweet Briar College. “Sweet Briar is proud of Explore Engineering and its relationship with AREVA.”

— Jennifer McManamay

The workshop is the second of three events that Barta has planned as part of a scholarship-funded project intended to introduce girls to the field of engineering.

Kelsey Barta ’15

Each session allows the students to explore a different area of the discipline through hands-on activities. Last November, participants covered chemical engineering. On Feb. 14, the girls will build trebuchets from kits and test them to learn about mechanical engineering.

Barta devised the activity for Thursday’s session on her own, coming up with the idea for a ball-rolling game to show how electrical circuits work. Two separate open circuits — one that lights an LED when closed, the other wired to a buzzer — are enclosed in a shallow box.

Circular openings are cut into the lid covering the wiring so that a metal ball rolled around the surface when it is tilted can become seated on the exposed wires, closing the circuit to either light the LED or sound the buzzer.

With help from Sweet Briar student volunteers, the girls will put the boxes together themselves, including wiring the circuits. The games are theirs to keep.

The Pannell Merit Scholarship funding the “Engineering for Girls” series allows recipients to spend their sophomore year exploring any project or topic that is important to them. Barta’s idea arose from her own experiences in her Seattle high school’s engineering pathways program, where she was one of only two girls.

“I always thought, ‘I don’t know why there aren’t other girls in here, because the stuff that we do is fun,’ ” she says. “So I figured middle school would probably be a good age to expose girls to engineering, because they can then discover what it is and that they can actually have a career in it.

Maybe as they move on to high school and start thinking about what they want to do, they might think of engineering.”

— Jennifer McManamay

Hank Yochum (from left), Jill Granger and Arlene Vinion-Dubiel are part of the Sweet Briar team leading a collaborative STEM teacher education program. Behind them math and science teachers workshop new lesson plans.

Sweet Briar’s STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) teacher development program is the subject of the first in a new online video series produced by PBS’s “NewsHour.” The series highlights kindergarten through high school science and math teachers who are using innovative teaching methods.

The lesson featured in today’s story is part of a 19-month project led by Sweet Briar in partnership with Lynchburg College.

Kelsey Barta, a sophomore engineering major from Seattle, has invited the Lynchburg and Amherst middle schoolers here for an after-school “Engineering for Girls” event. The project is T-shirt chromatography, an introduction to chemical engineering. It is the first of three workshops Barta is running to get young girls excited about the field of engineering. The other two, focusing on electrical and mechanical engineering respectively, will take place in January and February.

Barta is funding her project through an Anne Gary Pannell Merit Scholarship. She is one of nine members of the Class of 2015 to qualify for the program, which was initiated in 2010-2011 to reward exceptional first-year students with the opportunity to fully explore an area of interest during their sophomore year. The Class of 2014 was the first to complete projects under the program.

Pannell Scholars receive a merit award applied to their tuition and funds to support their project. It can be used for research, creative endeavors, or travel for academic purposes or service.

On this Thursday evening in early November, those funds have purchased a rainbow of permanent markers, white T-shirts, household rubbing alcohol and an assortment of packaged snacks. The latter fly about as Sweet Briar student volunteers toss little bags of Cheese Nips to waiting hands across the crowded room.

Barta explains that chromatography is a process used to separate substances, for example blood or ink found at a crime scene or pollution in air or water.

The girls stretch the shirts over plastic cups and secure them with rubber bands. Using eyedroppers, they drip alcohol onto dot patterns they’ve drawn in the circles formed by the cups, which causes the colors to separate and spread. The more they drip, the more the colors run.

They get creative. A sixth-grader makes a peace sign. Another draws the face of Firestar, the sleek ginger cat in “Warriors.” She’s a big fan of the children’s book series and, by the looks of it, a budding artist. Maybe just the kind of inventive female mind Barta wants to see entering the engineering profession.

She recalls being one of only two girls who participated in her high school’s engineering pathways program. “I always thought, ‘I don’t know why there aren’t other girls in here, because the stuff that we do is fun,’ ” she says.

“So I figured middle school would probably be a good age to expose girls to engineering, because they can then discover what it is and that they can actually have a career in it. So maybe as they move on to high school and start thinking about what they want to do, they might think of engineering.”

It seems to be working so far. Many are there because they like science in school, others are simply curious. But when Barta starts to wrap up the two-hour session, there are cries of protestation.

“Is it over already?” one asks. “I’m not ready to go home.”

The objections are short-lived, thanks to the final planned activity of the afternoon.

“Who wants to see live sharks?” a professor calls out to shouts of “I do! I do!”

The eager group flows toward the lab, where the biology department’s chain catshark colony thrives in aquaria — though evidently not without some trepidation.

“They wouldn’t allow wild sharks at the college,” one is heard to say as they pass.

— Jennifer McManamay

Participants will earn one college credit hour while exploring the many aspects of engineering. The introductory class focuses on the engineering design process and encourages students to solve problems in a team setting. Emphasis will be placed on the creative elements of engineering design. Students will explore the iterative design-test-improve cycle using tools such as three-dimensional computer-aided design and analysis software.

As part of the class, participants collaborate with Sweet Briar engineering majors and expert faculty and have the opportunity to meet with successful women engineers from area companies.

Online applications are available at sbc.edu/engineering. A $100 deposit is due with registration. Total participant cost is $600, which includes all meals, lodging, supplies and tuition. A limited number of need-based half-tuition scholarships are available.

For more information, visit the website or contact Hank Yochum, director of the Margaret Jones Wyllie ’45 Engineering Program, at hyochum@sbc.edu or (434) 381-6357.

Sweet Briar’s B.S. in engineering science is accredited by the Engineering Accreditation Commission of ABET. The College offers significant merit- and need-based academic scholarships for qualified engineering students, including awards of $5,000 per year for four years.

Contact: Janika Carey

Twenty-five sixth-grade girls from Nelson Middle School in Lovingston came to Sweet Briar yesterday for the first Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day. The event was organized by Hank Yochum, director of the Margaret Jones Wyllie ’45 Engineering Program, and project coordinator Paulette Porter-Stransky as part of National Engineering Week (Feb. 19-25).

While Sweet Briar has hosted high school girls before, this marks the first time 11- and 12-year-olds were invited to put their engineering skills to the test.

“Many of them are scared of science because they think it’s a boy thing,” said Vickie Mays, math teacher at Nelson Middle School.

And yet, she said, the girls had been excited about this day.

“I actually have a lot of boys that were upset that they couldn’t come,” she added.

The event focused on building an audio speaker. After a brief introduction by Yochum, the girls were each given small plastic containers that held a speaker kit. The kit contained all the necessary elements for building a simple speaker: one plastic cup, one Styrofoam cup, one piece of sandpaper, one small square magnet, one speaker jack, insulated wire and two rubber bands. It also came with detailed instructions and pictures.

In addition, the engineering department provided a variety of miscellaneous items students could use in the process, such as colorful paper plates, cupcake holders and wire whisks.

“We want to encourage them to be creative,” Yochum said. “We want them to say: ‘What happens if I do this … ?’”

Watching the girls get excited about engineering is the best part, he said. And there was certainly no lack of enthusiasm in the room, especially as students pulled out their iPods and phones to test their science projects.

“With all the technology they’re using, it’s cool that they’re learning how some of it works,” Yochum added.

Throughout the two-hour session, Yochum and assistant engineering professor Bethany Brinkman, as well as student assistants Kate Fanta ’15 and Kelsey Barta ’15, zipped from table to table to help the girls build their kits, and to explain how electromagnetism works.

The engineering department developed the speaker kits several years ago and has taken them to various schools and conventions. The fact that they’re easy to use and can be altered safely is a huge plus, Yochum said.

But it’s not just about getting girls to like science, or encouraging them to step out of their comfort zone. It’s also about letting them find that comfort zone.

“Girls really get to experience the benefits of an all-women’s school when they’re here,” Yochum said. “There aren’t any boys to annoy them.”

Next weekend, Sweet Briar will open its doors yet again for another engineering event. Geared toward high school girls, the Spring 2012 Explore Engineering Weekend takes place for the fourth time on March 2 and 3.

For more information on upcoming engineering camps, please contact Hank Yochum at hyochum@sbc.edu or at (434) 381-6357.

Contact: Janika Carey

It’s not all work and no play. Rosie Purvis and her friends make a late-night run through the Sonic drive-thru.

Sometime today first-year student Rosalie “Rosie” Purvis will compete in the women’s semifinal Modern Pentathlon Junior World Championships in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The field is composed of junior-level athletes — ages 19 to 21 — from about 30 countries.

Purvis is one of three women and three men on the U.S. team competing in the event, which involves five sports: fencing, swimming, equestrian show jumping, and combined running and pistol shooting.

The women’s final will be held on Nov. 19. There also will be men’s and women’s relays and mixed relays on Nov. 21.

Purvis, a homeschooler from rural Callaway County, Mo., trains anywhere from two to five hours a day — on top of a full class load. A first-year honors student, she plans to major in engineering science.

“Thus far I am excited, nervous, sort of worried, sort of prepared,” she said, about two weeks before leaving for Buenos Aires.

“I definitely feel like my swimming has improved because I have been swimming with Sweet Briar’s team and Jason [Gallaher] and Bonnie [Kestner] have worked to help me improve my technique,” she said of her swimming coaches.

Gallaher, Sweet Briar’s head swimming coach, says those gains come from her desire to get better.

“Rosie is definitely a coachable, focused student-athlete,” he said. “She is very interested in improving, and she is able to instantly apply feedback and instruction. Her willingness to make necessary changes to her strokes has been a huge factor in her improvement. I hope that what we have done with her will benefit her in this competition.”

Purvis uses a laser gun to practice shooting. She’s had less opportunity to train for the run/shoot, which concerns her a little, but riding has gone well. “I worked with the riding program, so now I can ride two days a week, which is great, and I am so thankful they were willing to help me,” she said.

It’s a tough schedule but Purvis, who also competed in the 2011 Junior Olympics Fencing Championships in the United States, and placed sixth in the 2011 U.S. Nationals in modern pentathlon, is facing her toughest and most prestigious contest yet.

Modern pentathlon was created by the founder of the modern Olympics, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who succeeded in adding it to the games in 1912. Like the original pentathlon, which mimicked warrior skills of the ancient Greeks, de Coubertin conceived the contemporary variation to showcase those of the ideal cavalry soldier at the turn of the last century.

According to the USA Pentathlon website, usapentathlon.org, de Coubertin believed the sport “tested a man’s moral qualities as much as his physical resources and skills, producing thereby the ideal, complete athlete.” The site also notes that then-U.S. Army Lt. George S. Patton finished fifth in the first Olympic modern pentathlon competition.

Modern pentathlon was opened to women in the Sydney 2000 Olympics. Purvis has her sights set on the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro, and she is willing to endure the rigors to get there. Indeed, she looks forward to it.

“I like challenges and I love to stay fit,” she says. “God gave me the ability to do something amazing, so I enjoy the hard work it takes to do pentathlon. After pentathlon, everything else seems like a walk in the park, and it gives me a sense of being able to accomplish anything.”

You can see highlights of the Junior World Championships on Pentathlon TV, and follow updates at pentathlon.org.

Lightbody went to Brazil with faculty and other students in last spring’s Technology and Society course to test assistive devices they had designed during the semester for clients in an occupational therapy clinic. They worked directly with their clients to refine designs on everything from prosthetic limbs, which Lightbody’s group worked on, to an eye-blink communication device.

Lightbody returned from Brazil in mid-June to work as a process, methods and engineering tools intern in AREVA’s PME-A group, which supports its nuclear business groups. She says her involvement in projects like Brazil, which was a team effort with students at St. Ambrose University in Iowa, helped her land the paid position.

“AREVA was very impressed with the number of projects I had worked on in and out of the classroom,” she said, noting she learned from them the sorts of things you cannot glean from a textbook: “Collaborating with co-students in a different time zone, collaborating with an organization in another language and working toward a deliverable.”

At AREVA, Lightbody’s responsibilities included verifying software errors via an Engineering Application Software Index, developing a user manual for the index, and developing data management procedures and software configuration management processes.

The experience helped her understand what engineers in the nuclear industry actually do, she said. “That may sound obvious, but it is hard to imagine what your future job might be like while you are still in undergraduate school.”

Lightbody says observing her co-workers’ day-to-day tasks solidified her interest in project management, but at the moment, her heart isn’t steering her toward the nuclear industry. Instead, she is applying to graduate programs in biomedical engineering and hopes to specialize in prosthetics.

The Brazil project wasn’t her first experience working with the devices. Last year she was part of a team designing a low-cost but fully functional and cosmetically lifelike hand for her Summer Honors Research Project. It’s a complex challenge, however, and making a state-of-the-art hand accessible to amputees in developing countries is a long-term goal that won’t be accomplished before she graduates.

So she and fellow engineering students Kellner Pruett and Caroline Sorensen found another way to help people who can’t afford the latest technology. They are working with prosthesis manufacturers to develop and deliver a custom arm and hand device to their client in Ilheus by next summer.

“He is such an inspiring individual — he is just grateful to be alive,” Lightbody said of the recipient. “He and others like him deserve to live a more normal life, and that’s what we’re trying to do. Our hope is that this project will be continued for others like him after we graduate.

“I just can’t wait to see him put on a prosthetic for the first time; he’s been waiting for this for over nine years.”

— Jennifer McManamay

Now in it’s eighth year, the annual Cardboard Boat Regatta can rightly be called a Sweet Briar tradition. It’s been part of Homecoming Weekend since there was a Homecoming Weekend, and it’s as old as the engineering program that sponsors it.

Students in the introductory class “Designing our World” get three short weeks to design and build boats capable of carrying two of their team members through an arduous course using nothing more than corrugated cardboard and duct tape. Each is judged on speed, buoyancy and overall design. This year they raced on Oct. 15 before an expectant Homecoming and Families Weekend crowd.

You could also say it is traditional that at least a couple of the inherently tippy, absorbent craft will sink before completing the course, some within seconds of launch. And the fact that this year not one of the six boats returned to the dock even marginally intact is not unprecedented — nor is it the norm.

The Destroyer, piloted by Hannah Bowers ’15 and Alison Hornbaker ’15, came the closest, coming within about 30 yards of the finish. Alas, the chilly waters of the Lower Lake swallowed it whole, the hapless paddlers going down with ship.

“None of the teams were tested for buoyancy since we ended up with soggy piles of cardboard,” said assistant engineering professor Bethany Brinkman, who teaches the class.

So it was that the always colorful John Morrissey, a marine biologist moonlighting as the race caller, had more than the usual fodder for his vivid commentary. Observing the nearly instant disintegration of The Facebook Status when its crew plopped into the waterborne paper tub, he said, “You can see one team designed the boat to disarticulate as rapidly as possible.”

It wasn’t alone. Variations on a double pontoon design abounded — a strategy that won last year but failed to hold up in 2011. One behemoth looked quite sturdy but the top collapsed and it broke apart, one pontoon joining the wreckage of similarly fated craft drifting on the lake.

Two such boats, the Redneck Party Boat and Piratical Sum of Infinity, were too unstable to handle the pilots, tipping them sideways every time they tried to board. Half of the Party Boat separated and bobbed off in the cool October breeze, the words “Ain’t It Purty” scrawled across its backside.

In the end it was a swimming heat for second-to-last place with two teams pushing or towing the remains of their work. The Partiers won it by a second, but only after a Herculean effort by first-years Rosie Purvis and Kate Fanta of Piratical Sum of Infinity to catch up after a late start — and numerous dogged but futile attempts to embark the proper way.

The Destroyer was the overall winner and it’s relative longevity atop the water at one point prompted Morrissey to quip, “In case you hadn’t noticed, one boat is actually afloat.” That was somewhere around the time he pointed out the safety canoe that circled the action in case anyone got into real trouble.

“Notice,” he said, “how much better fiberglass is than cardboard.”