Duck Races
Arroyo Seco, CA, May 1, 2022. Arroyo Seco Citizens Association (ASCA) today announced
that more than 400 people attended the 2022 Duck Race Festival. The 2020 and 2021
festivals were canceled due to the COVID pandemic. The festival featured two types
of duck races at a beautiful riverside venue, craft displays from local vendors and
citizens, as well as delicious barbecue meals & drinks.
The most eagerly anticipated was the “Unlimited” Duck Race which pitted 15 engineering student teams from Cabrillo College, Monterey Peninsula College and Hartnell College in an intense competition. The teams had no limitations on their choice of advanced propulsion and steering technologies that they installed into their 18” tall inflatable ducks.
1st place winners were MPC’s Afflack team (Manuel Gozzi, & Natalia Rivera), taking 2nd place Cabrillo’s Downstream Duck team (Andrew Bricken, Jacob Burns, Kyle Kessler, & Gavin Miller), and MPC’s Quackedup team (Raphael Gabriel & Noor Benny) took 3rd place.
Valarie Klingelhoefer, ASCA President, noted that the three engineering professors
(Hartnell’s Melissa Hornstein, PhD; Cabrillo’s Jo-Ann Panzardi, PhD & MPC’s Tom Rebold,
PhD), who supported the event and motivated their students to participate as competitive
teams in the “Unlimited Race,” all confirmed that their students loved the event,
were highly pleased and motivated by the cash awards earned by the three winners,
learned which engineering solutions worked the best, and were already thinking of
ways to improve the performance of their Racing Ducks for next year.
