Fun ways to play with your Puddle Duck
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Hatch Event - Team up with others, and try to create as many 3D hulls as you can in a weekend.
Often other puddle duckers that already have boats will help you build new ones, both for the fun of it, and to increase the local group of duckers.
(contact them directly from the member list)
Day Sail - See if anyone wants to meet up and go sailing. Short Voyage - Is there some interesting island, beach, geocache or water side restaurant that is some distance from a launch point you know about? Overnight Voyage - Its nice to have a beach you can pull your duck onto, and any duck can be converted into a boat you can overnight in, just lay down inside and go to sleep. Sailboat Games - There are lots and lots of really fun sailboat games |
Parent & Youth Racing - The kid is in charge of the boat, and the parent is there to help with whatever is needed. See: Parent & Youth Racing
Buoy racing - Can be as simple as bring your own buoys, set them out and go race around them. Don't forget to bring your home made trophies Mixed class regatta - Just like buoy racing, except invite people with other types of boats. Ducks have a US Sailing handicap rating of 140 State & Regional Championship - If you organize regular races, then consider hosting an annual state level race. World Championship - Anyone can capture the rights to host the world championship, here are the parameters: world championship race |
Contacting Other Puddle Duckers - Lets Go Sailing
When your boat goes 3D, you may want to email other local duckers to let them know you built a duck, and are interested in going sailing. The majority of duckers do not participate in discussion forums, simply because puddle ducking is about actually going to sail and enjoy your friends in person - not sitting around on the internet talking about it. Anyone can bulk post twitter messages, it takes real effort to go sailing, and ducking is one of the things that is worth doing !!
So you gotta email them direct and let them know you just joined us. We have an open membership list, and if a ducker has their email listed, that means it is OK to contact them directly about duck related stuff.
Contacting Other Puddle Duckers - Get Help Building Your Duck
Local Duckers - If you need advice and help building your boat beyond the freely available materials, then I'd suggest you contact other local duckers to ask them for advice, and possibly to get a look at their boat. It is amazing how much you can learn, just by seeing a puddle duck in person, even if only for a half hour or so. Also they will probably infect you with our can-do attitude, because puddle duckers are the most innovative boat builders on the planet. The advantage for them, is that when you complete your boat, you can go sailing together.
Article Contributors - The next people you will want to contact are duckers who have contributed articles. At the top of every article is a link to the ducker's contact info so you can email them direct. Since they are sharing what they know in an article, obviously they have real world experience and can elaborate further about what they have learned.
Boat Building Books - Books are expensive to have published, so usually they have good information inside of them. Here are the boat building books I think are worth mentioning.
Boat Building Forums - There are many boat building forums out there, but I do not participate in any of them, so can't really suggest or endorse any of them. You will probably want to visit the bigger forums which have a lot of message traffic and participants, so you can get a wider variety of opinions for what you are asking. Try doing a google search for boat building forum
Caution About Forums - Be weary of any advice you get from forums. There are people who frequently post only for attention and often do not know what they are talking about, and contribute very little to helping people build boats. There are many knit pickers who will take anything you say and try to grump about it, or only have a negative attitude and only explain why you can't do something. And/or take any opportunity to convert a question about boat building into a political argument or other non-related topic.
However out there in forum land there are people who do try to help others build boats, and have an open positive can-do attitude like we do, and will help you by sharing what they have learned with their experiences. If you wonder if someone knows anything about puddle ducks, you can simply ask them for their hull number and look them up on the member list.
Pay It Forward - After you learn to build your duck, remember how others helped you so when you have the chance, you can help someone else build their puddle duck, that way you pay it forward.
Feedback For Your Articles
First let me explain why I twist everyone's arm to submit articles instead of having an official class discussion forum. Forums generate mass amounts of text that are sort of just blurted out and don't necessarily mean much. The chat can be enjoyable but also there are issues with forums as described above. An "article" is a report of what was actually done with real world results and is a more complete statement.
This makes articles much more valuable and useful to other duckers - that is why I go to the effort of publishing them here on the website and make them really easy to find for other duckers and anyone visiting the website. In contrast, most of the things posted to forums get buried quickly with the continual chat posts and any useful information there disappears under the huge pile of chat text.
Unfortunately one of the biggest compromises of posting articles is the duckers that submit them do not get that much direct feedback on how useful they are. If you are a participant in a boat building forum, something you can do to get some direct feedback about your articles is to post a link to your article. That way the forum participants can discuss your article to give you some immediate direct feedback, and at the same time your article will be preserved here on the website, easy to find so it can help other duckers deep into the future.
Promoting Your Puddle Duck Events
What kind of events should you promote?
There is no single prescribed way to play with puddle ducks, and there are many other fun ways that are not listed above. Whatever you think is fun, chances are others will think the same, so it is merely a matter of getting the word out it is time to get together and have fun !!
Where to advertise your event
Posting your event only at online forums does not produce very good results. You need to contact other duckers directly, and this is the reason we have an open membership list. If they are interested, then keep their email address and keep them updated on your events. A good interval for reminder emails, is send a note twice a month, when within the 2 month window of your event. That way they have enough time to build stuff and make arrangements to participate in your event.
Send Articles to post here on the website
Everyone likes to look at pictures and see who is building ducks, and many people subscribe to my newsletter, including new people who haven't built their duck yet. If you send in an article, I can get it to them and maybe that will motivate them to build their duck and get involved too.
Sit Outside Home Depot *** MOST PRODUCTIVE ***
First you must understand that the majority of puddle duckers have never built a boat before, and many of them have never sailed before. The one most common feature is they like to build stuff, and people like that often visit home improvement stores on Saturday morning.
This is the most productive technique for bringing in new duckers to the club that I have heard of. Park your PDRacer outside your local home improvement store (with the mast up) on Saturday morning, and hand out flyers. John Bridges 512 has done this with great success. It helps to have flyers with a few pictures of how easy the duck is to build, your contact info so they can join your local fleet, and PDRacer.com so they can visit the website to use the other resources and information here.
Please get permission to do this, and I am sure the store will let you because they benefit from the effort too, because the new duckers will probably buy materials for their boats at that store.
Contact Local Newspaper
Local newspapers are constantly on the lookout for human interest stories such as puddle ducking. They would be more than glad to come out and cover your story. I have been in my local newspaper about once a year and it is simple -- you contact the paper and describe what you are doing. They will have you contact one of their reporters. You tell the reporter when and where they can see your event in action, and they will show up to cover it. They take their own photos and then write up a nice piece to include the story. Make sure to include your contact info and PDRacer.com so that readers will be able to find you.
Flyers in local stores
Most small mom and pop stores will let you post a flyer in their windows for an upcoming event. Gordon Seiter did that very thing in his town. The first time he just had a text description with some computer graphics and he said those flyers didn't work very well. The next year, his flyers had a picture of a partially build boat, and a picture of a couple boats sailing with a description like: build your own boat, come sailing with us. He said that flyer worked much better.
Craigslist.org
There is a free classified website called Craigslist.org They have a boat for sale category, and that would be a great place to post an advertisement for your event, or to get others interested in building ducks.
Host Hatch events
The best thing to motivate people to build their boat, is to host a hatch event. This is where you get people together to build bare hulls quickly - such as everyone meets at your garage on a saturday. If you make templates, you can quickly mark out pieces and cut them out. Invite other local duckers, they will come help build for the fun of it.
No Protected Territories
We don't have any protected areas, so anyone can host an event, anywhere they want. Ofcourse you want to use common sense and try not to screw up someone else's event locally by hosting something on the same day.
