Photo Story - Raft Races

 The final project in my Photojournalism class is a photo story, the story I chose to follow this week is my friend Anna Ehlers and her team who organized and participated in a philanthropy event. The event was a raft race of which took place May 19th and included eight other fraternity / sororities from around OSU. Commonly these events are held to promote and collect donations for non-profits and this one was no different, for this event the non-profit they were collecting for is the Leukemia and Lymphoma society. 

    The day before the event Anna (right) and her team of sisters, including Kyra (Middle) and Haley (Left) is reserved for building their raft. As part of the rules the only materials allowed are duck tape, cardboard, plastic bottles and anything else that can be recycled. The main idea that Anna's team had was to make a solid base made out of interlocking duck taped bottles with a sort of seat on the top. This ideas eventually turned into the craft you see before you, lovingly named Gary, due to the "totally necessary" handles (eyes) they added last minute. 

    

Now at the pool on May 19th we have Kyra, Anna and Haley posing with Gary and about to take on their competition. The finished craft was built to in theory give the rider a comfortable seat and good stability to stay upright and paddle but we'll see how that goes shortly. 

The race itself was a time trial event, meaning that the fastest times overall would be crowned the winner. Utilizing a double elimination ruleset, meaning that if you are the slowest in your group then your eliminated, the first couple pushed off from the start. These two represent Acacia Fraternity (left) and Phi Sigma Rho (right) both of which decided to go for a sort of boogie board design.

Once the race begins and the contestants make it to the first set of flags the spectators that purchased a pool noodle ($5 each) were allowed to jump into the pool and interfere with the riders to try and slow them down. While a couple people with pool noodles won't do much to a rider once there is 10 people in the pool splashing and smacking you it becomes a different story all together. The best time we saw was a 19 second sprint across from one of the fraternity teams that had their brothers defending the raft from other noodles, quite the team effort to be honest. 

The chaos that was in the water is best shown here where with all the water splashing into your face it makes it difficult to know exactly what direction you're going. Noodles flying and desperate paddling to get to the other side was a theme for this event and it was exhilarating. 

Finally to the second set of flags and the race is over. With that a total of $165 dollars was raised toward the Leukemia and Lymphoma society. Anna and her team, who were the second team for Phi Sigma Rho, ended up winning the Most Artistic prize at the end of the day. With the fastest time coming from Acacia, winning the golden pool noodle.