College Students Build Cannon, Lay Siege To Sailboats

“Topper," a citizen journalist and Naughty America fan from Washington state sent in this story about the time he and some friends laid siege to a flotilla of sailboats. Is an act of piracy naughty? Read and decide.

When I was in college, my uncle showed me how to make a cannon made out of soup cans. He called it a “dog food cannon,” because he made his with old dog food cans, and the name just stuck with us. So that’s what I’ll refer to is as for this story.

If you’ve never heard of the dog food cannon, let me explain it for you. The device is made by creating a cylinder with open ended metal cans and attaching the cylinder to a base can with 4-5 perforations on its interior end, and a single puncture in the center of its base end.

To shoot the cannon, squirt lighter fluid into the puncture hole of the base can and shake the cannon to disperse the fluid. Then load the cylinder with the projectile of your choice – something that fits snugly in the cylinder – and voila, you’ve got a powerful new toy!

My friends and I made our first cannon and test fired it using a toy basketball. I held the cannon on my front lawn while four of my friends watched. When I held the lighter to the hole in the base can, the cannon erupted – BOOM!—and went hot in my hands. The little orange ball shot out of the cylinder so fast that I barely saw it as it sailed over the neighbor’s house 300 feet away.

Our dog food cannon had passed the test.

A harbor sat beyond the neighbor’s house, and each weekend, the local yacht club held sailboat races. We weren’t big fans of the sailing crowd where we lived. The sailors our age all hung out together. Some were nice enough, but the ones who raced could be real pricks.

A few Saturdays after we fired our test shot, we again gathered at my house and made two more cannons. My friend Rodney worked at a country club and had gotten his hands on a few dozen old tennis balls. Another friend, Steve, got some water-soluble red paint from his family’s art supply store.

There was a race that day, and the boats always sailed past the house over which we fired our test shot.

We had decided to have a little fun with the racers that day, using our new cannon. Steve had come up with the idea of filling the tennis balls with paint and firing them over the house at the boats. We all thought it was a splendid idea.

We spent a couple of hours puncturing the tennis balls and filling them with the paint. Then we loaded our cannons and waited.

When the first boat appeared, we filled the cannons with lighter fluid and aimed them at a point above the neighbor’s house. We put lighters to the three base cans and – BOOM! – off the tennis balls went.

They arced high over the house and disappeared. We waited a minute, then did it again. The first two boats sailed into view. The lead boat appeared intact. But the second one had a streak of red paint visible on the sail. We knew from testing the paint tennis balls that the paint would splatter when the ball hit a firm object. If it hit a boat mast, boom, or deck, the sailors on board would get sprayed with paint.

One of our shots had apparently hit the deck and ricocheted into the sail. Rod passed around a pair of binoculars and we took turns assessing the damage. The two people in the boat were standing in the boat, looking in our direction. They both had red paint splattered on their clothes and faces.

We concealed ourselves and fired off another salvo at more boats. I believe we hit two or three more boats, though we didn’t stick around the see. The noise of the cannons had attracted a few neighbors. It was time for us to get out of there.

We drove to Rod’s family cabin and laid low for a few days. When we got back to my place, my father asked me if I knew anything about flying tennis balls filled with paint. He said that a racer had appeared at our house irate and splattered with paint, just after the race.

“Don’t know a thing,” I told him.

“I don’t believe that,” he said. “You keep doing this sort of thing, you’re going to end up like your uncle.”

That hurt.

My uncle is a great guy, but he’s been divorced twice and just got out of a three month stint in rehab.