The Floating Dutchman

Johan Huibers, a Dutch creationist, has finished his functional model of Noah's Ark and parked it in Dordrecht harbor.  Toby Sterling of the Associated Press writes:

Translating to modern measurements, Huibers came up with a vessel that works out to a whopping 427 feet (130 meters) long, 95 feet (29 meters) across and 75 feet (23 meters) high. Perhaps not big enough to fit every species on Earth, two by two, as described in the Bible, but plenty of space, for instance, for a pair elephants to dance a tango.

Johan's Ark towers across the flat Dutch landscape and is easily visible from a nearby highway where it lies moored in the city of Dordrecht, just south of Rotterdam.

Gazing across the ark's main hold, a huge space of stalls supported by a forest of pine trees, visitors gaze upon an array of stuffed and plastic animals, such as buffalo, zebra, gorillas, lions, tigers, bears, you name it. Elsewhere on the ark is a petting zoo with actual live animals that are less dangerous or easier to care for — such as ponies, dogs, sheep, and rabbits — and an impressive aviary of exotic birds.

According to a story in HuffPo, this ark took Huibers around four years to build—and it is functional, unlike that land-locked contraption being built by the Revved up Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis.

It would be fun to float around on the thing, if nothing else, to see how seaworthy it really is.

Johan Huibers’ Ark

I mentioned this a bit back. In Holland, Johan Huibers has built a life-size replica of Noah's Ark in Dordrecht. Robert Nisbet of SkyNews HD writes:

He used the ancient measurement of the cubit - the length of a man's arm from the elbow to the fingertips - to build the craft according to Biblical proportions.

In Genesis the ark is described as being 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide, and 30 cubits high so the mammoth effort took him and his team of five just over four years to finish.

The ark is apparently a museum although they wanted to float it over to the London Olympics:

Deborah Venema-Huibers, manager of the Ark, told Sky News that they had to abandon plans to sail the ark to the London Olympics after they were asked to make the wooden boat safer for visitors.

She said: "We would like to carry three thousand people on the boat (so) you can't say: 'We'll leave it like that'. You have (to clear) everything with the fire department, as it is all wood. It took such a long time that we had to skip the Olympics."

Still, this is kinda neat and, who knows; on a local level, this might have worked.