This year’s Punkin Chunkin includes new activities, events and opportunities. The Delaware Lottery is offering a new e-game and prize-pack drawing, the first Punkin Chunkin pageant is poised to start a new tradition and 400 drivers will have a chance to park on the infield.
The new e-game is simple but nearly as amusing as watching people hurl gourds onto a farmer’s field.
Players get three chances to fire pumpkins via a cannon or catapult. The total distance of the three tries is the final score. Players also get one opportunity to sign up for a prize-pack drawing for his-and-hers, limited edition Punkin Chunkin T-shirts and $100 in Delaware Lottery bucks. The new game is accessible through www.punkinchunkin.com and www.delottery.com/punkin_landing08.asp.
Also new this year is the Punkin Chunkin pageant, which will be on the main stage at 10:30 a.m., Sunday, Nov. 2.
Categories include Little Miss, ages 6 to 10; Junior Miss, ages 11 to 15; and Miss, ages 16 to 20. All contestants will give a short speech and do a beauty walk on stage. Contestants will be judged on their facial beauty, personality, poise and grace, and all will receive a tiara for participating. Those who are crowned queen in their categories will get larger tiaras.
Returning this year is on-field parking for the first 400 vehicles that arrive at the new Wheatley farm site in Bridgeville, where tailgating will be permitted. More than 100 teams will be competing this year, and all will participate in the daily free-fires.
Competitors will have the opportunity to fire all kinds of fruits or vegetables, as well as pumpkins, during the free-fires, which last until dusk.
The three-day world championship event is Friday through Sunday, Oct. 31 to Nov. 2. The gates open daily at 7:30 a.m. Practice sessions begin at 8 a.m., and competitions start at 10:30 a.m. The new site is approximately a mile east of the intersection of Route 404 and Route 18.
In addition to the flying pumpkin spectacles, the weekend’s events include food booths, craft booths, rides for children, a cooking contest and live entertainment. Friday’s events will conclude with a concert featuring the Charlie Daniels Band and Randy Owen, sponsored by Delaware Lottery and ING Direct. Saturday’s events will conclude with a fireworks display.
Admission is $9 per person and free for children 12 and under; parking is $2. Concert tickets are $40 per person and for sale at the Bridgeville town office, Lewes Chamber of Commerce & Visitors Bureau, Seaford Chamber of Commerce, Harley Davidson of Seaford and the Cape Gazette. For more information, to reserve a campsite or to order tickets, call the Punkin Chunkin Association office at 302-684-8196 or visit www.punkinchunkin.com
Event to be featured on Science Channel Nov. 27
Pumpkins. Good for carving, making pies, baking seeds and a flurry of other fall favorites. But a catapulting pumpkin competition? Now that’s an unusual job for this orange gourd-like squash. For 22 memorable years the Delaware-based World Championship Punkin Chunkin has hit the skies. This year, Science Channel is honoring the backyard engineers who turn pumpkins into projectiles with an inside look at the high-flying, far-flung action of the 2008 championship. “Punkin Chunkin’ premieres at 9 p.m., Thursday, Nov. 27 on Science Channel and Science Channel HD as the culmination of the network’s first Demolition Day Marathon.
“Punkin Chunkin” covers every angle of the intense competition from growing special, aerodynamic pumpkins and determining the perfect pumpkin’s mass to the mechanics of the air cannon and the physics of catapults. Viewers will not only get an in-depth look at the history and rules of the struggle for pumpkin launching supremacy, but will learn the engineering science behind the competition from Dr. Frank Wilczek, the 2004 Nobel Prize winner in Physics. After all, reaching the holy grail of Punkin Chunkin–launching a pumpkin one mile–requires factoring in wind speed, pitch and the hurler’s elevation in addition to the pumpkin’s mass, shape, size and stiffness.
Part awesome science experiment, part genuine Americana, this one-hour special, hosted by comedian Brad Sherwood of “Whose Line is it Anyway?” documents the ingenuity of the biggest, loudest, greatest pumpkin hurling competition in the world. Sherwood will follow select teams as they journey from machine design to testing their equipment to the competition’s climactic finale, where every team hopes to reach the one-mile mark.
“We’ve often said Science Channel celebrates the stunning breakthroughs, the eureka moments and the hilarious miscalculations that encompass the enormous breadth of science,” said Clark Bunting, president and general manager, Discovery’s Emerging Networks. “With healthy doses of engineering, physics, imagination and pure fun, this competition perfectly embodies the new Science Channel.”
Since 1986, Sussex County, Delaware has been home to the annual Punkin Chunkin World Championships—a three-day festival where hardcore engineers and backyard tinkerers trailer their gigantic, homebuilt contraptions with one common goal: to launch eight to ten pound pumpkins as far as mechanically possible. The competition is divided into seven categories defined by the type of machine used—motorized, centrifugal spinners, and the mighty air cannons. Bringing the sport of pumpkin hurling to ever greater distances of chunkin, the heated competitions have created a current world record of 4,438 feet, just 800 feet short of a mile. Could this be the year that one team hits the coveted one-mile mark and is crowned the greatest chunkers ever?
Throughout Science Channel’s Demolition Day Marathon, Brad Sherwood will count down to the “Punkin’ Chunkin” premiere with interstitials featuring behind-the-scenes antics and little known facts including: unique uses for all the chunked pumpkin goo, the secrets of growing ballistic pumpkins, and, of course, fantastic performances of the Punkin Chunkin anthem.
Online at www.ScienceChannel.com, visitors will be able to see behind-the-scenes footage of the competition, a video tour of the trebuchet (a medieval catapult design), and receive a timeline of the event. To learn more about the brains behind the brawn, the website will also feature profiles and interviews with “Punkin’ Chunkin” and, should the urge to catapult pumpkins strike, visitors will learn how they, too, can compete in this awesome sport.
source: capegazette.com