Hades Water Taxi was a catamaran with coffin-shaped platforms and guitar-shaped oars costumes included Styx t-shirts to match the lyrics from the album The Ferryman stenciled on the boat’s sides. The Trash Birds, up from Richmond, Virginia, had a glorious craft called Riff Raft that boasted a waterslide and a hammock, which was powered by two bicycles turning a paddleboat-style plastic barrel with rubber fins. There were the Sea Monkeys, in fur bikinis and monkey ears, whose boat was a canopied platform atop two yellow-painted canoes. The festivities haven’t been held there for years, but the name stuck.Īs always, “combatants” decked themselves and their boats out spectacularly. Even the name is a tribute: When McNeill was trying to find a location for the first one, Duke Riley suggested Mau Mau, a small, uninhabited island in Marine Park, Brooklyn. He describes the Battle for Mau Mau Island as “cathartic joy mixed with a bit of art and some gladiatorial combat for structure.” It started as a wild but intimate gathering for friends, and even as it’s grown, that feeling remains. Orien McNeill originally conceived the event as an after-party for the 2011 Swimming Cities project Ocean of Blood, during which he and a dozen other artists piloted handcrafted motorcycle-powered pontoon boats 400 miles down the Ganges River. Then everyone paddled, kicked, floated, or sailed out to tie on to a massive nebulous flotilla, anchored this year by a huge multi-level platform constructed atop several legitimately seaworthy vessels. For the ninth year running, teams assembled, chose themes, created bathing-suit-adjacent costumes, and built or procured something capable of staying upright in water. Last weekend was another occasion for NYC’s chaos-loving DIY crew to cobble together their best watercraft and head out to the Rockaways for this year's Battle for Mau Mau Island.
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