Rich Klajnscek, spokesman for the Cape Anne Rowing Club stood on a table in the cafeteria at Gloucester (pronounced glos’ta), High School in Cape Anne, Massachusetts and gave us the latest weather conditions saying that the course was ripe for record breaking speeds. The sky was clear, the sea calm, wind light and variable from the south west and the tide was racing out of the Annisquam River to help speed us on our way. My chief concern was the heat, but when at 7:20 we walked out the cafeteria door, the sky was a symphony of grays. It was one of the most spectacular skies I had ever seen complete with mammataform clouds looking like a shag rug painted navy gray all matted and turbulent, hanging upside down. Heat was not a problem.
I was in Gloucester to race in the Blackburn Challenge, a twenty mile circumnavigation of Cape Anne, MA. I was rowing a fifteen foot, sixty eight pound Adirondack Guide Boat along with four hundred sixteen other folks racing various craft from paddleboards to outrigger canoes, shells, kayaks, dorys, pretty much anything that is self powered. The race commemorates a herculean effort by Howard Blackburn who in 1883 was separated from his fishing schooner on the Burgeo Bank during a squall in mid-winter. Howard rowed sixty miles to land though he lost his dory mate to exposure and had his hands freeze to the shape of the oar handle loosing several fingers to frostbite. Evidently acquiring a taste for climatic enterprise this ‘Fingerless Navigator’ went on to sail twice across the Atlantic, alone.
My ordeal was that I had just reached three score (the word is hard to say) years. I had made up my mind that in order to keep in shape, competing was the ticket to survival. So I began to save money from side jobs with the intent of finding a fast rowing boat to take advantage of the vast waterways available to me. At a boat show in St. Michaels, MD I was able to corner Steve Kaulback out of Ferrisburg, Vermont and rowed in one of his Kevlar Guide boats. It was love at first stroke, but it still took me about four years to get up the nerve to actually buy it.
Guide Boats are not as fast as rowing shells and having been a college oarsman, my friends questioned my sanity why I would forgo a sliding seat which takes advantage of leg power (a double raced at Blackburn and turned in a phenomenal 2:22:21) for a fixed seat which relies mostly on back, chest and arm muscles. To them the whole deal seemed a little archaic but I wanted something more versatile than a racing shell. My intent was to be able to take passengers or even go sailing. So this past Spring I gathered up my courage, threw out my supplements, got my ailments down to bursitis and tennis elbow, pleaded my case to my wife and came home smiling with a new boat in time to start training for the Blackburn Challenge.
The overview to this race is very plain; “Unless you have solid experience in difficult conditions with the boat you plan to use, you should not enter this event. We have no rain date; there’s always an event”. My only goal was to finish and be able to speak in complete sentences when I got there.
By the time I launched the sky had become a uniform gray and a light rain began to fall. We had dodged severe weather and thankfully because the sky was still overcast the racing conditions were now perfect. Getting out to the starting line early I was able to scope out my competition. I was surprised to find that most of them were of a similar age to me and it dawned on me that perhaps I could have a respectable showing. At the time I was aware of only two other guide boats. One was nicely varnished carrying a crew of two, one rowing from the bow the other paddling from the stern. The other boat held back from the crowd and I figured that he would be a tough nut to crack.
My class, fixed seat single was the third to start behind the Banks Dorys, workboats and paddle boards. It was a La Mans style start on a fairly short line so it took a while to get sorted out from the centipede like arms of the oars and get headed down river. The order of start is designed so that the slower boats start first which gives the race committee a shorter day on the water than if the slower boats started last. The only drawback is that the oarsman, facing aft cannot see what is in front of him so you must train yourself to be constantly turning you head around to look forward for the slower boats ahead. About one hundred yards from the start I narrowly missed a channel marker and had to pick my way through an anchored fleet of pleasure boats and lobster pot buoys that had long handles and made an unpleasant ‘whack’ when your blade smacked into one.
By the time I reached the ocean I had passed one competitor and the next one was sitting on me about fifty yards ahead so I increased my stroke rate and slowly began to overtake him. We both understood that if I passed him that there would be no rematch so this is where the race really started. The other issue was using too much energy too early as we were only about five miles out but the chase was joined and there was no holding back.
Gradually we closed and when I looked over at him we just sort of smiled at each other and slowly I pulled ahead. My strategy then was to gain about a hundred yards and sit on him but taking anything to eat or drink required stopping and losing ground so the only option was to keep up the pressure.
By the time I established a comfortable lead before heading into Gap Head, I turned around and saw about as far ahead of me as the boat I had just passed was behind, the sulky guide boat that had lurked in the shadows at the start and the thought occurred to me that I could take him.
Mean while I was passing boats from other classes and in turn being passed by others. There was always a steady stream of humanity ringing clockwise around the island and I was impressed that a majority of competitors were in their mid thirties and up, very fit and friendly. Of all the boats there, the Banks Dorys left me in awe. They are the type of boat that Howard Blackburn rowed, double ended, slab sided (about two foot of freeboard) heavy and not built for comfort or speed but for carrying a large cargo of halibut. I passed a dory rowed by two young men and I was impressed that there was continually a bone in its teeth, white water at the bow. I may have come in ahead of them but their effort was inspiring.
As I mentioned earlier, food could be an obstacle to speed but without it you are also sunk. I saw a man in a shell actually stop and eat a sandwich but I had come prepared with faster food. While shopping I picked up red seedless grapes and after some thought realized what a great rowing food it would make. They were neatly packaged in their own edible sheath, no peels or cores to fuss with, sweet without getting your hands sticky and you could throw down a hand full and hardly miss a stroke. The only drawback was you didn’t want to inhale them and to make sure they were not attached at the stem. I drank from Camel Back reservoirs stowed beneath the seat and all I had to do was reach down and pick up the tube and drink away without pausing.
Tooling right along, generally being passed by the different but faster fleets that had started behind me , a young woman stroking past me in a varnished Mahogany single asked how much time was left and looking at my watch found that there was only one hour. Well it was time to wrap up and I was feeling fortunate that I had not hit the proverbial “wall” and the chance was better than average that my speaking ability would not be seriously impaired at the finish. A swell had risen from the ocean and the wind had come up and looking around could not find my quarry. Occasionally a wave would rise up between me and other boats which gave the illusion that the paddler was temporally sitting on water. Heads and torsos would pop up and down looking like an aquatic rendition of whack- a- mole. On reaching Eastern Point and the home stretch, the wind and swells came around behind and my only competition was a pretty little Herreshoff double that traded leads and finally passed me. We rowed straight down the harbor, surfing on some of the waves and finished at the Greasy Pole near the Fisherman Memorial and to my surprise found two guide boats already up on the beach. The winner was Gerhard Munger with a time of 3:34:23, about 12 minutes ahead of me and Rob Gunther, the phantom on the horizon, only a little over two minutes. I was impressed that they both came down to congratulate me and we exchanged tid- bits of racing techniques and I was surprised to find that he did not use the short stroke favored by guide boat enthusiasts but a longer stroke preferred by sliding seat crowd. I called my wife Barbara who was acting as photographer but unfortunately the truck battery had decided to expire and she spent the day waiting for Triple A to connect. A red haired Irishman finally appeared, ran his diagnostics, pronounced the victim dead, replaced it and we drove back to the finish line and I received a shiny new third place metal, and a stout engraved beer glass with lunch.
I had exceeded my expectations so when we returned to our hotel in Peabody (pronounced pea’ baa dee) we feasted on Lobsta’. Reflecting on my choice of boat I was pleased to find that out of four guide boats in the race, the first three to finish were guide boats. Looking back over results from 1999 to the present for the Blackburn Challenge, guide boats have dominated the fixed seat competition. It is a design that has changed very little since its development in the 1830’s, and boats being children of compromise tend to be modified over time or lead to evolutionary dead ends. That the boat was conceived in the back woods of New York and Vermont and performs so well in open water is a serendipitous development that I was glad to fall into.
Carol says
Fascinating well written article – almost like being there!
Dino C says
Great article, and a good job writing. I found it very intertaning. I’ve heard of this race and in the past and I’m very familair with boath the guide boat and the Vermont Co. I’ve looked at them for several years myself.
Rowing a guide boat, How much training would you say you need to successfully finish the race?
Thanks
Rob Gunther says
Jim,
Great article and great race. You did fantastic, and are a force to be reckoned with in the future.
I didnt have my “best day” this year, but still had a great time as always.
I consider a priveledge just to be able to compete in the Blackburn.
You should come up to our area and do the Adironack 90 miler some year. It is the first weekend after labor day every year.
We should talk about rowing strokes (as you mentioned in the article). My opinion is that is good to be adept at both forms of “strokes” and use them when appropriate. I use the shorter strokes when I want to hold max speed for period of time, and the longer strokes when in what I call “85 percent heart rate mode”. This is kind of the gliding aerobic stroke. Gerhard and I are stauch competitors, as you can see and also best of friends. We both have and use both strokes depending on the conditions.
We hope to be be chasing you out in the lead next year!
Rob Gunther
wendy costa says
Makes me want to buy a guideboat!
Wendy
Ken Noble says
Hey Jim,
Awesome stuff. Well delivered. You represented us well you SOUTH RIVER (md), LONG LAKE (ny) wild man!
Ken
Patrick, Skip, Bushby says
Congratulations on rising to a daunting and inspiring challenge! I raced canoes guideboats and various plank and log craft slapped together on the rivers of the northeast but this sounds like a must do to the list. Thanks for the great story. Hey Ken, I’ve got a fun little design for a two man entry… You got game? Skip
Bill Kille says
Some times it’s not winning that counts, it’s just “doing it”. Great story!