IT'S A BIRD? IT'S A PLANE?

NOPE, IT'S A FLYING PUMPKIN!

If you were driving along Leavitt Road in South Amherst Sunday morning and thought you saw flying pumpkins, don’t worry; you weren’t seeing things.

Brad Crawford, Cub Master of Pack 427 said that the event, “Pumpkin Chunkin” is a fundraiser for the Cub Scouts. “This event will help us raise money for operating expenses such as badges and shirts, things like that. This will make it easier for parents so they don’t have to lay out that extra money to put their kids in the scouts. We’re just trying to make things financially feasible for parents with expenses racking up.”

Aside from launching pumpkins through the air guests were also able to launch pumpkin rockets (made out of 2 liter pop bottles), but that took a lot of muscle power. Large slingshots were set up to fire gourds at targets. (A gourd is a hollow, dried shell of a fruit in the Cucurbitaceae family.)

The main attraction of course was the pumpkin launcher. Guests were able to pick the pumpkin that they thought would fly the longest distance. The team manning the launcher would place the pumpkin in the pouch, set the trigger then let the guest pull the cord sending the pumpkin flying.

The idea of launching pumpkins came after the Scouts spent a day painting pumpkins. Crawford said that while decorating the pumpkins it came up in conversation that it would be fun to launch them. “We were initially going to build a small one just for the pack but then it grew into this. A group of us spent two weekends together doing the construction so a lot of work went into it but we plan on doing this each year so it will come in handy for us.”

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