Pumpkin Catapult Safety Board Sets 400-Foot Range Limit for Annual Chunkin Exhibition

GOURD LAUNCH — The Pumpkin Catapult Safety Board voted unanimously Friday to cap projectile range at 400 feet for this year’s annual chunkin exhibition, following last year’s incident in which a trebuchet-launched pumpkin traveled 612 feet, cleared the spectator berm, and “achieved low orbit over the parking lot,” in the board’s words, before striking an unoccupied pickup truck.

The new rule requires all launching devices — catapults, trebuchets, air cannons, and the perennially controversial “centrifugal arm thing” — to undergo a calibration throw with a standardized 10-pound test pumpkin. Devices exceeding 400 feet must be “de-tuned” by shortening the throwing arm or, in the board’s preferred phrasing, “respecting the field.”

“Chunkin is about precision, not just distance,” said board chairwoman Angela Reyes, a former physics teacher who keeps a dented test pumpkin on her desk as “a teaching aid and a warning.” The board also mandated 50-foot buffer zones, hard hats for pit crews, and a “Pumpkin Downrange” horn system: one blast for launch, two blasts for “pumpkin behaving unexpectedly.”

Competitors grumbled. “Four hundred feet is a warm-up throw,” said three-time champion “Big Arm” Don Pritchard, whose trebuchet “Sir Smashes-a-Lot” holds the unofficial field record. “You might as well ask a race car to idle.” Reyes was unsympathetic: “Mr. Pritchard’s truck-denting throw is precisely why the board exists. The pickup’s owner has been compensated in pie.”

The exhibition draws 8,000 spectators each October. This year’s event adds a “junior chunkin” division, limited to hand-thrown mini pumpkins and, Reyes stressed, “absolutely no siege engines constructed during study hall.”

The “Pumpkin Downrange” horn system got its first real test during calibration throws Saturday: one blast for launch, two for “pumpkin behaving unexpectedly.” The two-blast signal sounded twice — once for a pumpkin that “achieved significant lateral drift” and once for a test gourd that “simply disintegrated at release, which the board classified as ‘a structural confession.’” Reyes pronounced the system “functional and, I’m not ashamed to say, fun to operate,” though she cautioned spectators that “two blasts means look alert, not look up.”

The new junior chunkin division — hand-thrown mini pumpkins only, ages 8 to 14 — has drawn 60 entrants and, Reyes said, “the most wholesome trash talk in the history of the sport.” One 11-year-old, asked about her strategy, said she “throws like she’s mad at the pumpkin but respects it.” Pritchard, the three-time champion, has volunteered as a junior coach, a role Reyes called “redemption arc material”: “Last year he dented a truck. This year he’s teaching an 11-year-old about follow-through. The board supports this journey.”