{"id":199,"date":"2019-05-24T12:29:00","date_gmt":"2019-05-24T12:29:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.packshare.org\/blog\/?p=199"},"modified":"2021-05-03T12:35:44","modified_gmt":"2021-05-03T12:35:44","slug":"penryn-raft-race-2019","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.packshare.org\/pages\/uncategorized\/penryn-raft-race-2019\/","title":{"rendered":"Penryn Raft Race 2019"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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I was so excited when I heard about the Penryn Raft Race.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I was growing up my family had a rowing boat moored at Forder Creek in Saltash, so I spent a lot of evenings and weekends slowly and methodically exploring the beaches along the river Lynher. It seems doubly strange to me, after 15 years of living in Falmouth, how little time I\u2019ve actually spent in the Harbour.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I swim, snorkel and surf in the ocean pretty regularly, but I\u2019ve always thought of boating in the harbour as something that other people do. The raft race seemed like a great way to remedy that, but it also ticked some of my other excitement boxes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Firstly I love a good craft challenge<\/strong>, and building a raft out of reused materials would be high up on my bucket list if I was the kind of person who had a bucket list. In fact I\u2019d been kicking around an idea of hosting a Packshare Birdman competition for a few months – grabbing a load of business packaging and seeing what kinds of flying devices we could build, and how far we could fly them into the harbour \u2013 and this tickled the same part of my brain. We decided to go one further than the official brief of reused materials and build our raft entirely out of mail-order packaging available through Packshare.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Secondly I love that the event was jointly hosted by the FXU <\/strong>\u2013 Falmouth and Exeter Students Union \u2013 and the Penryn Town Council.<\/strong> Everyone knows the relationship between the universities and the local community is not always plain sailing, and this is exactly the sort of event I think we need to highlight the best of both sides. I\u2019ve worked for the Universities for most of the past decade and I\u2019m just as despairing at how unloveably they portray themselves as I am with the \u2013 tiny minority \u2013 of locals who dismiss the worth that students bring to our community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thirdly we shamelessly wanted the press<\/strong>, and the raft race is local press gold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So we started by setting our Packshare<\/u><\/a> profile to ask for bubblewrap. This meant that we would be flagged up to anyone in our area who was trying to get rid of bubblewrap through Packshare.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Next I went on a trawl of the town for a decent pallet. Falmouth has always had an amazing culture for scrounging free stuff, and I always start any search by just walking through town and wandering around the back streets. The serendipity of it can be truly amazing, and I\u2019ve found at least two sofas when I needed them most. Currently we\u2019ve got an office chair and wicker shelving unit which were street finds, and pallets are never in short supply.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I quickly found my dream pallet outside of Trago Mills<\/strong> and they kindly said I could take it. It was massive and relatively lightweight, ideal for raft building. You might rightly complain that pallets aren\u2019t listed on Packshare, and while that is currently true, we\u2019re currently overhauling the site and they will be available in the version 2.0 so I gave us a break.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Next we dropped into Willow and Stone<\/u><\/strong><\/a> and grabbed some plastic wrap that they couldn\u2019t reuse, and I salvaged some printer-paper boxes from work – thanks FXPlus Library<\/u><\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We cleverly decided to build it up at Falmouth\u2019s own vegan eatery Satellite Caf\u00e9<\/u><\/strong><\/a> on Tregoniggie Industrial Estate partly because I wanted to scrounge some boxes from their neighbours Falmouth Cycles<\/u><\/strong><\/a> \u2013 who were wonderful and supplied most of the cardboard for the hulls \u2013 but also because the Satellite sausage rolls<\/u><\/a> are out of this world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n