The year was 2014 and I was in love. You wouldn’t think this was an engineering problem, but you would be terribly horribly wrong. You see the woman who would soon become my fiance, Liz DiFiore, had been donating her skills for years to the It Happened to Alexa Foundation, and they had an idea. Let’s get everybody in the Niagara Falls region, and build boats out of random junk… To complicate matters, your scrap-piles would be sponsored by locals, be manned by your team, and raced down the Niagara River in an altruistic cash-grab the world had never before seen. After roughly half a year of pleading that we finalize the team and get to work, we began a two-month crunch to build a watercraft from start to finish!