That beloved yearly tradition of getting in a boat with your friends and rowing around for a length of time is right around the corner. That’s right — time for Day of the LongBoat. It’s like Storm the Wall, but water! And the thing about water is it’s unpredictable, ever-shifting and full of mystery, so participants this year should be prepared for some minor changes to the event.
This year, in the spirit of cooperation, all teams will be eliminated and every participant will be placed in one extremely long boat.
The Ubyssey caught up with the figures behind the change.
We found the main instigator — an administrator by the name of Jethro Morbidity — gesticulating frantically at numerous workers in a local boat factory. He was eager to take us through his thought process, talking with the speed and force of the tumultuous ocean while making dramatic flourishes toward a pile of ashes.
This pile, Morbidity said, was a former longboat used for the event, which he had burned as a lesson to all.
“Longboat? Can you imagine,” Morbidity said, face red, “that they had the gall to call this a longboat? It’s what, 15 feet, tops! No, I think we can do better than that, don’t you? Feet, can you imagine? No, we’re talking kilometres here!”
When asked exactly how long this new longboat was going to be, Morbidity was equivocal.
“Really long, okay?” he said. “I keep having to come in and explain to them that they need to make it longer. And then they think I mean ‘make it longer.’ No, I mean ‘make it LONGER.’ We’re pushing a new horizon of boat longness now. We don’t dare stop until the boat is long enough to offend God.”
We even managed a sneak peek at the longboat itself, and we can confirm: it is extremely long.
Last week, it stretched out of the building and was blocking several streets, necessitating that multiple cranes line the avenue for the purpose of lifting buses over it to remedy the disrupted routes. Morbidity was reportedly seen the week prior driving around Kitsilano with a bulldozer, demolishing houses in the boat’s predicted path.
When asked about this (and if the homeowners had consented) his only comment was that it was “for a higher purpose.” Upon being asked about the Freudian connotations of this action, Morbidity grew belligerent and The Ubyssey decided to cut the interview short in concern for the safety of our reporters.
The student body appears to be somewhere between apathetic and bemused toward the change. “I’m really gonna miss the competitive aspect,” said Alanna Placeholder, a third-year chemistry student. “But, I guess they’re not wrong — the boats before weren’t really that long in the grand scheme of things. And we gotta have truth in advertising, right?”
At press time, the boat attempted to turn left and is currently wedged in Burrard Inlet.
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