Rowing in the Blackburn Challenge

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Outside Magazine, July 2004

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Out There
Blackburn and Blue (Cont.)

THE RACE STARTED pretty much the way I'd expected: The two fast, smooth guys bolted into the lead while the rest of us hung together in a loose pack. It was fun to call out obstacles—"Hey, you're about to hit that buoy"—and look into the picture windows of elegant waterfront homes. Far more satisfying, however, was picking off the slower vessels that had started before us: the lumbering dories, skiffs, and wherries.

As we approached the lighthouse that marks the end of the Annisquam River, I was sitting comfortably in fourth place among the sliding-seaters. Then we came around the corner into Ipswich Bay, and the real race began.

The wind was blowing hard, driving big waves before it and occasionally pushing whitecaps over their tops. Suddenly, without warning, a wave broke directly over the bow of my boat. It wasn't really scary—the boat is a sealed, watertight tube, and even the little hollow where my feet are braced has a self-bailer, a sort of one-way drain. But it was still a shock. Back home on Peconic Bay, the only time I ever filled the footwell was when giant powerboats waked me at 20 knots. A minute later I took another wave, and felt a growing sense of alarm. I was soaked, barely moving, and still a good 19 or 20 miles from the finish line.

Incredibly, it got worse. The tide was running in direct opposition to the wind, and at each of the several rocky headlands that lie between Annisquam Light and Halibut Point, the sea pitched up in the most absurdly chaotic mess—a "potato patch," as sailors sometimes call it—short-period, six-foot-high waves that seemed to come from all directions at once. The footwell was perpetually swamped now, my forearms were pumped from choking the oars in a death grip, and dime-size blisters had begun to well up under the calluses on my palms.

It was at one of these junctures—the second or third potato patch, I think—that I noticed another racer 20 or 30 yards to starboard. It was the sole woman entered in the sliding-seat category—Kinley Gregg, I learned later, a 41-year-old historian from York, Maine. Somehow she was rowing smoothly through the slop, gaining on me at what seemed like four or five feet per stroke. "I like the challenge of uncertain conditions," Gregg explained to me later. "I abhor the monotony of river rowing, where every stroke is exactly like the last and the oarsman strokes along like a metronome. I say, if it's not doing anything, it's not water, and not worth going out."

Head down and suffering, I barely noticed the other rowers going by. But rounding Halibut Point, I was relieved to see that at least one of them, the guy in the life preserver, was still well astern. Then, just as I turned for the long run across Sandy Bay, he made his move, flanking me 100 yards to port. I glanced over, not quite believing it. Obviously he was riding some secret ocean current that everybody but me knew about. The day's humiliations were hardly over, though. Behind me, just rounding Halibut Point, I could see a small figure robotically chopping at the water with a double-bladed paddle—the first of the kayakers.

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