Marc got to get on some scuba gear for this one, and I just got to grimace: I very recently had broken my right collarbone two days before filming, so my main objective was to act natural. The mean old directors said I couldn’t wear the shoulder brace on TV, so I just had to pretend I wasn’t in continuous agony – they don’t teach you that at acting school. I was able to hold back the tears, but you may notice my right arm doesn’t move much during this episode.

At West Edmonton Mall, my 7 year old son Joel, who came along because I needed him to get my clothes on with my broken wing, got to go swimming while we played with a toy boat in the water. Here I pretend to be a leftie and try to demonstrate why ships use ballast water at all. The reason is simply to keep the boat from getting too top-heavy when it is less than fully loaded. Engineers call this having your centre of buoyancy and your centre of mass the right way around.

When it came to simulating cavitation (that’s where pumps or propellers get going so fast they actually boil the water around them), any serious marine engineers out there will be able to tell we had to “fake” that one, because we didn’t have a strong enough motor to really cause cavitation.

You’ll see we put an outboard motor in the water and it looks like there is a helix of bubbles formed, but it’s really air being sucked down from the surface. Ah my students at the U of A will crucify me now when they hear we faked that one. Had we used a motor that actually induces cavitation, half of West Edmonton Mall would have gotten flooded from all the water spraying around.

Well, as we found out along the way with Project X, sometimes experiments just don’t behave for the camera like you may expect! Tune in and check out our antics. Watch Brian Alters chasing iguanas around Florida, and Jenn interview a guy who walks in poo (hey, I didn’t write the script, if it were us they probably would have made Marc and I walk in it too).