As a child in Michigan, John Pollack entertained himself by building tiny sailboats made of cast-off milk cartons or orange crates. At Stanford, he once constructed a crocodile-shaped boat out of cardboard and sailed it, sort of, across Lake Lagunita. But for 30 years, what he really wanted was a boat made of wine corks. Last summer, he finally got one.
With the help of a rotating crew of friends and family, Pollack spent 17 days in July navigating a 410-mile stretch of the Douro River in Portugal aboard a vessel built with 160,000 corks.
The two-ton boat was the product of a peculiar obsession that also drew in Pollack’s parents, who have dutifully collected wine corks since Pollack was a child. Solving the engineering riddles took years. After much experimentation, Pollack discovered that seven wine corks bound together form a hexagon. Expanding on this idea, Pollack and his friend Garth Goldstein, an architect, made two hexagonal discs a foot in diameter by strapping long rubber bands around exactly 127 corks at a time. No glue was used. The discs were stacked, attached with an elaborate rubber band system and formed into pontoons. These were secured with rock-climbing ropes down each of the pontoon’s six faces, then encased in commercial fishing nets. Volunteers helped build it in Washington, D.C., where Pollack, ’88, lives.
Pollack, a freelance writer whose clients include former president Bill Clinton, says he was treated like “a rock star” in Portugal following press reports of his adventure.
“I’ve been on a lot of great trips in my life,” he says. “This ranks right up there with the best of them.”
