Cal Poly float ready for reveal at Rose Parade

SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. - Hundreds of helping hands are working quickly to get all the festive floats ready for the Rose Parade on New Year's Day.

People are drawing, painting, welding and arranging flowers.

It's a joint year-round effort between Cal Poly and Cal Poly Pomona to build one float.

The theme of their float this year is "Aquatic Aspirations," it features a submarine navigating around a sunken shipwreck with colorful marine wildlife.

After reviewing more than 100 concepts, the Cal Poly Universities' teams narrowed their choices down to one.

"We have the submarine that's in the back of the rendering and we're going to put that up 25, 30 feet in the air," said Float Driver and manufacturing engineer Walter Trygstad. "That has to be able to move down so that the top of it is below 16 1/2 feet and so that we don't hit things like bridges or traffic lights."

The Cal Poly Team is coming off a successful year. In 2019, the Rockin' Space-Themed "Far Out Frequencies" won the Prestigious Extraordinaire Award, the first time the two-campus team ever received this honor.

"Getting something that we never really thought we could achieve has really inspired us to set our stakes even higher," said Cal Poly Team President Sydney Strong.

Cal Poly's float will be the second float of 39 floats in total and the fourth overall participant of the parade.

This year's parade theme is "The Power of Hope."

This will be Cal Poly's 72nd entry to the parade.

700,000 people watched the parade in person last year with more than 70 million others watching on television.

You can catch all the action live on NewsChannel 3. The parade goes from
8 a.m. to 10 a.m. on New Year's Day.