The 56th Kinetic Grand Championship kicked off from the Arcata Plaza on Saturday under a beautiful sky with 50 unique sculptures participating.
People flowed into the Arcata Plaza and its surrounding areas to take in the fun and excitement to kick off the action for the 50-mile venture across Humboldt County, with all but one float successfully making its way out of the plaza square.
Between the balloons, pyrotechnics, and community joy there was something, and likely a float, for everyone, with the teams competing for 31 different awards, none greater than the Grand Champion that will be chosen following the conclusion of the race on Monday.
The Grand Champion is awarded to the team with the highest combined score based on the art, engineering, speed, and pageantry that completes the race. The final requirement is that the team who wins the Grand Finale must be ruled an ACE. The ACE teams are allowed only one pit crew per pilot and that pilot must complete each portion of the course while riding their sculpture. ACE teams aren’t allowed to push their sculpture except in designated “Legal Push Zones” and while in the water, only the pilots are allowed to propel the sculptures into the bay.
“The whole concept of all this is amazing. It restores my faith in humanity every year,” Aaron Graff said, a member of the Plaid Maxx team. “I’ve never seen camaraderie, teamwork, just broadband support for everyone like this. It’s inspiring, it’s glorious.”
On Saturday, racers left the plaza, headed toward Samoa on state Route 255, traversed June’s Dunes and navigated Deadman’s Drop before pausing the race at Halvorsen Park near the Samoa Bridge for the night. The action resumes Sunday morning with the first water crossing on Humboldt Bay and then a trek to Crab Park in Loleta. On Monday,the teams cross the Eel River at Fernbridge and cruise into Ferndale to cross the finish line.
“This is my sixth year, the race has been going on for over 50-something years. The people here are cream of the crop,” Graff said. “I came here to visit my sister and ran into the race one weekend and knew I wanted to do it someday. Came back 20 years later, and here we are.”
While the 50-mile three-day race might sound tiring on its own, the process of constructing the sculptures takes even more time, with Graff saying he and the Plaid Maxx team began working on the sculpture soon after the new year.
“This was a one-man trike (tricycle) but we turned it into a quad this year, so a huge engineering upgrade,” Graff said. “Then we added last-minute art, that’s why we did Plaid Maxx, because post-apocalyptic looks simple and junky. The whole engineering, the front end, that was a big deal, we spent most of the winter working on that.”
In recent years at the Kinetic Grand Championship, fans are bound to see a few Squid-Heads out and about, with the Grateful Squid team all donning matching red squid hats.
“Our team is mostly based at Open Door. It’s Open Door employees, former employees, friends and families,” Gail Hovorka, member of Grateful Squid said of her team. “We’ve had the machine, the mechanical part, for a number of years. It always has to be fixed. We’ve been using the sculpture part, the art part of it, for three years. Before that we were banana slugs.”
Every participant seemed to have a different favorite part of the race, with Hovorka’s being the water crossing part of the race, drifting along the Humboldt Bay, even if that part of the course gave the Grateful Squid some problems last year. The battle with the bay last year got the team the Golden Flipper H20 award, which is described as, “any sculpture that tips, flips or otherwise goes ass-over-tea-kettle into the water.”
“We didn’t have our pontoons on right and we got the Golden Flipper Award,” Hovorka said. “Our back ends sunk and they had to pull it out and re-do the pontoons.”
Even with last year’s misfortune, Hovorka is confident in her team’s ability to learn from their mistake.
“No, not again,” Hovorka said, while also discussing why she enjoys the water portion. “Floating along the bay, I just think that’s kind of calm and beautiful.”
The race continues Sunday starting with the Humboldt Bay crossing at 10:07 a.m.
Dylan McNeill can be reached at 707-441-0526.
