Every July, the waters off the coast of Nanaimo, British Columbia, transform into a high-speed spectacle that sits somewhere between a demolition derby and a comedy sketch. Forty homemade bathtub boats—rigged with plywood hulls, roaring engines, and paint jobs ranging from pirate flags to heavy glitter—line up for one of the West Coast's wildest traditions: the Nanaimo Bathtub Race.
The Georgia Strait doesn't care if a vessel started its life as a porcelain tub. Relentless swells roll in, wakes cross from every conceivable angle, and within the first two minutes of the start gun, half the fleet is fighting simply to stay upright.
Racing this bizarre event year after year brings a persistent creative challenge: how do you actually capture what it feels like to be caught in the middle of aquatic chaos?
Standard action cameras mounted to the bow usually just result in a lens covered in saltwater spray and a violently shaky horizon. Meanwhile, a drone might deliver a neat postcard view from above, but it entirely misses the grit and drama down at water level—like the split second a rogue wake nearly flips a competitor right beside you, or the wall of spray breaking over your own hull mid-turn.
Capturing the Chaos with X5
Representing UA Local 170 out on the water, Mark Donnery and the team solved the visibility puzzle by mounting Insta360 X5 on an extended pole right off the stern of their tub.
Because X5 records everything in full 360, there was no need to guess where the action would unfold. Instead of trying to point a camera while hanging onto a bucking fiberglass tub, they let the camera roll continuously and reframed the footage later in post-production.
The setup unlocked a massive range of perspectives from a single run: clean shots of their own tub carving through the wake, rival competitors closing in fast from behind, and the horizon violently tilting as they took a wave broadside. It captured moments that a traditional fixed-lens camera would have missed entirely, simply because nobody on board can predict which direction the race will turn sideways next.
The Ultimate Save
The best highlight of the race came when a competitor's tub nearly capsized just twenty feet off the port side. Because X5 was capturing every angle simultaneously, the dramatic near-miss was caught in crisp detail—even though the crew was busy fighting their own steering at the time.
Being able to find the shot after the fact instead of frantically chasing it in the moment completely changed how they document the race. When you're careening across the strait in a bathtub powered by a screaming outboard motor, having an unblinking, all-seeing eye on the stern is the ultimate competitive advantage.
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