The small mound of taupe-colored clay was provided to serve as a base for the proud white masts of the boats as they skimmed the waves.
And it did. Sometimes.
But it was most popular in the boat building competition for children Wednesday at Geneva Memorial Pool as a sort of do-everything-putty, linking pieces of stick together or whatever else didn’t seem to want to be where the contestants wanted it to be.
Each participant was given a small paper bag with the mound of clay, some short and long sticks, a straw, a piece of white cloth, some thin rope, a couple of pennies and a plastic banana-split dish, an hour to get it done . . . but no real instructions.
So the 50 contestants toiled through the construction, each with their own idea on the perfect way to create a sailable finished project.
“I’m just looking at it in my mind,” said Emma Conlon, 7, when asked how she was figuring out how to build her boat. “I see a boat, a big boat.”
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“You just build it any way you want it, and you put clay, and sticks and cloth and rope together and it turns into a boat and then we race them,” said David Schonback, 11, a laid-back approach that proved to be a winner when he later finished first for his age category.
To race their boats, contestants lined up in the water on one side of the pool and created waves behind their boats to sail them to the opposite side.
Boat construction seemed to be a good age equalizer as the children’s parents and guardians looked as bewildered as the youngsters about how to proceed.
Some, like 6-year-old Nick Helmer, just poked the cloth in the top of the straw, and piled all the rope in the bottom. That may be the way go next year as he became the first-prize winner in his age category.
But maybe winners don’t need masts at all.
“When my sail thing, my white thing, fell off, I just put it inside my boat,” he said.