By Shawn J. Soper, News Editor
Originally published July 30, 2010

OCEAN CITY – With a last beer at the last stop of a grueling 16-plus hour tour of Ocean City’s famous and not-so-famous watering holes, a weary group of nine friends from all over the country early last Friday morning successfully completed a trek into the Guinness Book of World Records for the most pubs visited by a team in 24 hours.

The nine-member team, from as far away as Seattle, Wash. and Portland, Ore., had its first beer around 9:30 a.m. last Thursday over breakfast at the Ocean View Grill and BBQ in the Quality Inn on the Boardwalk at 16^th Street. A little over 16 hours later, around 1 a.m., the group finished its last beer of the tour at the Sandbar on 32^nd Street, completing a journey into the Guinness Book that took them from the Inlet to the Delaware line and practically everywhere in between.

The final beer at the Sandbar marked the 102^nd stop on the trip, setting a new Guinness Book record for the most pubs visited by a team in a 24-hour period. The previous record of 101 was set in Seattle last October, and judging by the interest generated in the record-breaking attempt late last week, the new mark of 102 could be challenged soon, perhaps in the same town where the bar, no pun intended, was set.

“By Friday morning, when we were all packing up and getting ready to head off in our different directions, already we heard people calling into the radio talk shows in town about how they can beat the record,” said John Egan, who organized and documented last week’s record-breaker. “We had just set the record hours earlier, and already there was talk about taking it down. We’re just going to have to come back and raise the ante.”

At the outset, Egan and his crew believed the record attempt would be more of physical stamina and logistics than alcohol tolerance and that proved to be the case. Although more than a couple of team members were a little fuzzy near the end, the physical demands of the 16-hour tour took its toll on the record-setters, according to Egan.

“The hardest part toward the end was just getting from one spot to the next,” he said. “By the end, two of the team members had trouble walking, and we found fewer and fewer places still open.”

According to the specific Guinness Book rules, the team had to rely on public transportation or travel to the various establishments on foot, which was not a problem in the early going. After the first stop at the Quality Inn on 16^th Street, the team headed south on the Boardwalk and looped around the south end of town before heading back up the Boardwalk.

“We were able to knock out a good bit of it in the first couple of hours because of the close proximity of the bars and restaurants,” said Egan this week. “We went down the Boardwalk and hit the places that were open already, then we swung around to some of those downtown bars and headed back up the Boardwalk to pick up the ones that weren’t open on the way down. A lot of the places were cool because, even if they weren’t open yet, when we explained what we were doing, they let us come in for a quick one to cross them off.”

After moving through the downtown area on foot, the team had to rely more on the Ocean City bus system for the rest of the record-breaking attempt.

“After the downtown area, we looked for areas where spots were clustered and got off the bus in areas where we knew we could hit five or six in a short amount of time,” he said. “We did that for the rest of the day as we went all the way up to the Delaware line and started heading back down again.”

From the beginning, the team did not seem overly concerned about the amount of alcohol that would have to consume along the way. According to the Guinness Book rules for the record, one member of the team had to have at least one drink at each venue. According to the rules, the definition of a drink was at least a quarter of a pint, or 125 milliliters, roughly 4.4 ounces.

At that rate, in order to set the 102 mark for pubs visited in a 24-hour period, each team member would have had to consume an average of 11 drinks and a few would have to have 12 over the 16-plus hours it took to accomplish the feat. However, Egan said it never really came down to who had what or how much to drink.

“In the beginning, we were following a rotation about who was up next, but after a while, it came down to ‘who wants this one?’” said Egan. “I don’t think there was ever a time when somebody on the team wanted to be skipped.”

Of course, one of the biggest challenges was keeping everybody focused on the task at hand.

“At one point, one of the guys ordered a bunch of sushi and we had to wait awhile for it,” said Egan. “Those kind of things happened throughout the day. We had some team members that wanted to wander off at a couple of points during the day.”

Egan said he is in the process of putting together the strict documentation required by the Guinness Book, including his log of the places visited complete with signatures, pictures and video evidence, which he will submit in about a week. After that, Guinness Book officials will review the documentation to determine if the record is valid, a process that could take several weeks.

RSS | Print This Article | Email To A Friend | Add To Favorites Comments