Ledyard — Seconds after Michael "Q" Qin arrived at Highlands Lake Park, he was in charge.

The Naval Submarine Medical Research Laboratory investigator had brought dozens of people to the lake on an 85-degree Sunday to set sail in boats that wouldn’t survive the day, and he was excited about it.

“Let’s go,” he yelled, urging the members of 13 teams to bring their boats to the water.

Qin has now led the cardboard boat regatta for two years as part of the Ledyard Libraries’ Maker program, alongside Andrea Buka, the program's coordinator.

This year the competition drew 13 boats, with crews as large as four adults and as small as 9-year-old Miranda Felton.

Miranda, who lives in Ledyard, had named her boat the Lavender Moon. She had taken some hints from the TV show "MythBusters" to tape together her cardboard vessel.

Its seaworthiness was anyone’s guess.

“The boat is untested,” she said. “That the purpose of the lifejacket.”

Rob Hanna, of Ledyard, was just as optimistic. He competed in the regatta last year with his son.

“We have a goal this year,” he said. “We hope to actually float. Last year we learned a lot of things about how not to build a boat.”

That’s exactly why Qin said he wanted people rowing around Highlands Lake with soggy cardboard paddles.

“I’m a sciency, nerdy guy,” he said. For the kids and budding scientists who built boats, “it’s an opportunity to see that success and failure is the same thing. I want to instill in them the humility that comes with science.”

Kids and adults alike pushed off from shore in their boats, some flimsier than others.

Paddles bent in the water, wind pushed paddlers across the water and a fair number of Sunday’s participants fell straight into the shallow water.

The boaters competed for prizes in speed and agility, fought a water balloon war and experimented with how many people could fit in each boat before it sunk.

The biggest cardboard boat belonged to a team of 10 people – including a physicist, two engineers and a Ph.D. -- who had spent two days working to get the vessel ready for Sunday.

Stew Simpson, an employee at the Navy research lab, led the team in covering the boat with an extra layer of tape.

Qin had encouraged the team to start over when he saw how large their boat was getting after several layers of cardboard and a foot-thick bottom.

But Simpson said they had pushed on, and named their ship after the fallacy that brought them to Highland Lake with a boat held together by 45 rolls of packing tape: Sunk Cost Bias.

“Engineering is difficult, but any idiot can make something strong,” Simpson said. “We just taped all day.”

On Sunday, the sunk costs paid off. The research lab team’s boat dwarfed other vessels, held up through the water balloon fight and won several of the day’s competitions.

At the end of the afternoon, 18 people stood inside it before it sank.

Jeffrey Bolkhovsky, a UConn student and an intern at the Navy research lab, learned a lesson.

“Sometimes a bias isn’t bad,” he said.

m.shanahan@theday.com