Key Aspects:
- David Rush was a guest aboard Disney Wonder when he set a world record for breaking toothpicks in February 2025.
- The attempt has not yet been verified due to a submission backlog, but is a significant leap over the previous record.
- Rush seeks to break a different world record every week, even when in the middle of the ocean on a cruise.
A Disney cruise is full of activities, from trivia and crafts to entertainment, games, and music. Multiple sea days can start to drag on any cruise, however, so what should a guest do if their itinerary includes not just one or two, but 11 days at sea?
For David Rush, the answer is simple: break a world record for snapping wooden cocktail sticks.
While Rush and his family didn’t plan to be on a Disney cruise at the time, it turns out the 15-night sailing from Australia to Honolulu, Hawaii would help with another family goal, that of visiting all 63 US National Parks (the last one on their list being the National Park of American Samoa).
The easiest way for the family of four to reach the national park was onboard the ship with a port visit to American Samoa, but the transpacific itinerary ultimately included a total of 11 sea days between time in the South Pacific and North Pacific.
Rush did not specifically identify which Disney ship was the site of his record attempt, but Disney Wonder is the only ship in the magical fleet to have been in Australia in 2025, the year he made his attempt (more on the timing later!).
The ship’s February 10, 2025 departure from Sydney was the repositioning leg to Honolulu in preparation for the ship to sail first in California then in Alaska. On February 17, the ship did stop in Pago Pago, the capital of American Samoa.
To fill part of the time at sea, Rush decided to work on breaking the Guinness World Record for most cocktail sticks (toothpicks) snapped in 60 seconds.
Planning the Record Attempt
Disney Cruise Line was not affiliated with Rush’s attempt on the record, but his preparations and practice did attract attention onboard.
“What started as me messing around quickly turned into a full-blown event on the ship. A crowd of passengers gathered to watch, and I had to recruit official timers and witnesses to make sure everything was completely legit,” he described. “The ship’s onboard celebrity juggler, James Bustar, even stepped in to help judge.”
To set up for the record, Rush arranged the cocktail sticks along the edge of a bar for easy grabbing in a straight, smooth line. He had already broken a similar record previously, so he knows the rhythm and plan necessary to make it work.
The “60 seconds of chaos” commenced, with Rush hyper focused on snapping each stick cleanly. If even a sliver remained connected between fragments, that pick would be disqualified and not count toward the record total.
When the timer finished, and after painstaking verification of each clean break, a total of 84 toothpicks thoroughly snapped the previous record of 58.
Not Quite Confirmed Yet
More than a year after the attempt, however, Rush has not yet received confirmation of his achievement. Guinness World Records is very backed up with verification of these types of records, so the “official” count remains at 58, set by Harrison Niswander in Huntington, Indiana in November 2020.
Because Rush seeks to break a different world record every week, he’s familiar with the verification process and how long it may take when attempts are submitted individually. To date, he has broken more than 350 Guinness World Records.
While many cruise ships are record-breakers in terms of size, amenities, and other statistics, Rush’s attempt actually isn’t the first world record onboard a ship.
Cruise Hive reported in February 2026 that Princess Cruises broke the record for eight hours of margarita sales onboard Regal Princess. MSC Cruises also holds a fun record, that of the longest line of LEGO ships in a row, which was set onboard MSC World America as the ship prepared to make her debut.
