Boat Sinking Contest on Shawano Lake

(Shawano, WI.) On Sunday, July 15th, Mona and I took a ride with our boat on the lake to attend the Annual Boat Sinking Contest, held at the old "Bamboo Bar" on the south shore of Shawano Lake. We fished for about an hour or so before the event was to begin. Mona caught about 2 or 3 small Northerns and I didn't get anything in the boat except for some of the famous weeds we have in this Lake. You could say I was just practicing my casting skills?

We ran about 4 miles west on the Lake from where we launched at Swan Acres and were about the 4th or 5th boat to drop anchor in the front row. Some friends of ours from The Sandbar happened to anchor their pontoon boat next to us afterwards. The woman from the pontoon boat is also a cook at The Sandbar and makes excellent soups including "Chili"!!! There were supposed to be 9 boats entered in the contest but only 8 of them participated after a 15 minute delay waiting for number 9.

You'll see in the upper right picture (click on it to enlarge) that this is towards the end of the contest. The one boat is just ready to go down because it is taking in water as the people shift their weight. Eventually the green Mirro Boat on the left will be the winner of the event. Mona and I think they should have been disqualified because all through the contest they sat on the side and hardly participated thus they were able to stay afloat.

Basic rules of the game were that all the boats had to stay in a roped off area. There were three people in each boat. One person steered the boat with oars and the other two had buckets they filled with water as fast as they could and threw it towards the other boats to sink them. One final rule was that you could not bail water out of your boat so you better fill someone elses before they fill yours.

The event lasted for about 45 minutes. I know I would not be able to participate in this event because I cannot imagine filling a 5-gallon bucket with water and continually throwing it as far as I could to fill the other boat. At my age - this is an extreme sport.