Students race their sailboats

Friday afternoon was windy, great for sailing, but the greater stretch of Lampe Creek was dry. However, intrepid students of Meredith Swanson-Jessup's sixth-grade class were not to be deterred.

They used Lampe Park's eastern slough, brimming with ducks, to race the miniature sail boats they'd spent all week constructing as part of a unit on physics and oceanography.

"This is so motivating for the kids," said Swanson-Jessup, who has organized Gardnerville Elementary School's sail boat race for 20 years. "The students get ingenious with their creations. If their boat floats, they get an A. If it capsizes, they get a C, and if it sinks they get an F. But I have never had one student get an F."

Anna Hammond, 11, named her small wooden schooner after her grandfather, A.R. Hammond.

"He recently passed away," she said. "I was very close to him. He liked boats."

The sleek design of Anna's boat advanced her to the semifinals.

But the schooner couldn't out-perform 11-year-old Laurei Roger's styrofoam barge.

Laurei had used the lid of a styrofoam cooler for the body of her boat. She had strapped SpongeBob characters to the deck and now watched as wind filled the tiny trash-bag sails and sent the cartoon figures gliding across the water. The hull was light enough, the sails snappy enough, and Laurei won the entire competition.

"It's cool that I won," she said.

But defeat could not diminish the other students' satisfaction with their own creations.

"I got really close to winning," said 11-year-old Ryan Ramos.

Ryan had made his boat out of a milk carton and had used a piece of his Star Wars light saber for the mast.

Classmate Aaron Greene's vessel, the Mimi, had its own stamp of adventure.

"I have three hands on crew and one treasure chest," Aaron said of the plastic-bottle ship with paper-towel sails.

He pointed to his crew.

"These are Indiana Jones Lego figures," he said, "and I bought them with my own money."