YBOR CITY, FL -- At 180 feet - plus, the world's longest cigar takes up almost an entire city block.
"We still here and we still making big things," said Wallace Reyes, the man who hand-rolls cigars at the Ybor City Museum almost every day, and the man behind the world record attempt. "So why not bring the worlds longest cigar to the cigar capital of the world?"
Over the past few weeks, Mr. Reyes rolled super-long cigars sections in preparation for Saturday's record attempt.
"In my case I have to do it in sections because we don't have a building that we can make it in continuous length therefore we have to create sections of about eight to nine feet and then put it together the day of the festival," he explained.
The sections were housed in a box along the back wall of Wally's rolling station at the Museum store -- right under the world record recognition plaque he got back in 2006 -- when he made his first world's longest cigar, only to see that mark smoked by Jose Castillar in Cuba last year.
"The record is 148 feet 11 inches," he said.
On Saturday morning, the sections were joined over a several hour period and the final adjudication was made later that day.
Before the announcement, Reyes said, "We're gonna have a brand new record!"
Fortunately, his hard work paid off, and the record was his.
