I just bumped into this whilst looking for/watching tutorials on boats and water (it turns out I need to acquire some expertise on those things). It has nothing to do with boats or water... it just struck me as fantastic creativity and genius. If there were no mean people in the world, we could have a wilderness full of things like this. Oh well, we can have a town full of stuff like this... just a little smaller scale.
I tried to play this map on the default texture pack...lagged to nothing. You guys should see the other stuff FVdisco has made. All that redstone he uses is too much for my brain to compute..