Essex River Race: Cutting Corners

The start of the Essex River Race is 2.74 miles from our front door - close enough that the acrid stench of a defeat there would prevent us from opening any windows for the next month.  So it was with an increasing sense of panic that I surveyed the formidable field assembling at the Essex boat launch.  In addition to perennial thorns Jan Lupinski and Eric Costanzo, we were joined by Sean Brennan (unbeatable), Hugh Pritchard (inscrutable), Eric McNett (immortal), Mike Dostal (unknown), and Ben Pigott (ill-clothed).  I was intimately familiar with the 6 mile course around Cross Island and had been training hard, but could I avoid being skunked by these guys?  Maybe not, but at least I could take solace in crackerjack parking spot I had secured the night before.

Giving Bill a megaphone is like giving a bear a moped - you hope for the best but still prepare to dive for cover.

Impishly designed with an immediate sharp left after the start, the Essex River course is perfect for the kind of carnage that jaded spectators now demand.  However, the starter effectively sabotaged the carefully planned chaos by surprising some with a short countdown.  The net result was that the twenty-some skis started in tiers rather than all abreast, meaning that the progression around the turn was unsatisfyingly orderly.  I'm told that many in the crowd on shore demanded their money back, despite Sean's sacrificial effort to entertain them with an impromptu workshop on rudder line repair.

Even at low tide, the channel of the Essex River is sufficiently deep for large motor craft to navigate out the winding estuary to the open ocean.  This implies that - paddling in a rather high tide - we could have chosen a course through waters more than 15 feet deep.  Perhaps with disorienting flashbacks of the Narrow River Race clouding our collective judgement, we eschewed that option.  Instead, we cut every corner of the winding river in search of the shallowest suck water possible.  The mud caked on my paddle blade and the sea grass still wedged between my teeth are testaments to just how successful we were.

For the determined paddler, there are no obstacles.

After clearing the first turn, a pack of a dozen or so leaders settled into a chemically stable drafting matrix.  The horde remained in this attack formation for a unnaturally long period, with only slight perturbations in configuration.  Some have speculated that the shallow water made drafting easier, while others suggested that it was a misguided case of giddy esprit de corps.  Even a chain reaction of collisions caused by an unexplained swerve somewhere up ahead couldn't dampen our enthusiasm for solidarity.

Entropy, however, is implacable.  Jan and Hugh were the first to leave the union, their article of secession citing irreconcilable differences in target speed and in tariff policies.  Once the surface tension of our once tight-knit band had been violated, the resulting flood of deserters was inevitable.  Mike popped his K-1 into a new gear to try his luck alone, the entire Eric contingent splintered off to test the waters to the far right, and I made a move to hunt down Hugh.

Jan had managed to shake Hugh from his wake, and the latter now looked vulnerable.  Over the course of the next 5 minutes, I cut his 100 meter lead to a couple of boat lengths.  Perhaps he got wind of my pursuit (only a third of the way through the race, but I was already pretty ripe) because it took me another 5 minutes to close the remaining distance and finally settle onto his draft.  As we rounded the back of Cross Island to head back towards Essex, I gauged Jan's lead to be at least a dozen lengths.  In his black shirt and dark kayak, Mike was well-camouflaged for the overcast day.  I suspect he was at least that far again ahead of Jan.

Paddler X took advantage of his anonymity to taunt Ben and Eric with impunity.  Evaporation, however, would prove his eventual downfall.

I don't know Hugh very well.  I've met (and been soundly beaten by) him at a few previous races, but this was his first time competing in a ski (Stellar SES) rather than a racing kayak.  As such, he now merits further scrutiny.  Hugh is a quiet, reserved gentleman in person, so I had to resort to the Internet to unearth his squalid personal details.  Turns out he's the 73 year-old head of Comparative Plant and Fungal Biology at the Royal Botanic Gardens outside of London.  He's also a 21 year-old junior at Kansas State majoring in psychology and "partying down".  And, finally, a 32 year-old dog-walker in Sacramento whose hobbies include macrame and collecting fluorescent minerals (ask him about his clinohydrite).  He looks great for 73, but, quite frankly, gone a bit to seed for the other ages.  Regardless of his true provenance (based on his accent, perhaps China?), Hugh was 90% likely to beat me if I stayed behind him.

With a couple of miles to go, I centered myself, took a deep breath, and hurtled myself to Hugh's right.  I had hoped to shake him, but he locked onto my port side and held fast.  Apparently irritated by all the shallows and reeds, Jan had decided to take out his frustration on straight lines.  Weaving like a drunken toddler (perhaps in search of deeper water, but who can be sure?), he left the door open to those of us who still cling to Archimedes' tired old cliche about the shortest distance between two points.  We had been blasting through the shallows on the most direct route until then, I'd be damned if anything shy of an extended uphill slog was going to change my strategy.  We were closing the gap to Jan, but unless he helped us a little more (perhaps with some gentle loops), the course was going to run out before we caught him.

Over the past five minutes or so, Hugh and I had established an unspoken contract.  I won't bore you with all the undecipherable legalese, but the gist of it was "We agree that since we're both at 100% effort, there's no reason to push any harder".  Since I was in the lead at the time at which this sacred covenant was tacitly invoked, it stood to reason that this admirable status quo would be maintained through the finish line.

With a mile to go, Hugh wantonly breached our contract by accelerating ahead of me.  Whether he had misrepresented his previous level of effort or had managed to burst the shackles of mathematical limits (by 4 or 5 percentage points, I'd estimate) - that's a question for future generations of legal scholars.  Although confident that any subsequent result would be overturned on appeal, I slipped over to his wash in pursuit.  I'll deny it under oath, but I suppose I can admit in this forum that I had also maintained some off-the-books reserve.

With 3 bends of the river left before the finish, I started to think about passing Hugh.  That was such a pleasant thought, I savored it through another couple of turns.  With the final bend approaching, I made my move.  Some kind of tightly-calibrated laser measurement device might have been able to detect my progress, but it would have been impossible to see any advance with the naked eye.  Hugh slid over to provide enough room for me to pass on the inside of the curve.  While one might interpret this as a gallant gesture, I maintain that Hugh's confidence that he had nothing to fear from me in a sprint tends to undermine any (so-called) noble intent.  I did what I could with the opening he cynically provided, but I had to settle for the feeble moral victory of finishing with a sliver of overlap between our boats.

Giving Hugh a ski is like giving Bill a megaphone - you'd rather just see the bear on a moped.

Mike won the race handily in his K-1, leading to a cutthroat bidding war to lock him into a ski for future races.  Although we had managed to close the gap to Jan in the final couple of miles, he still ended up a half-dozen boat lengths ahead of Hugh and me.  With his third consecutive surfski win, Lupinski's reign of terror threatens to drain all joy from the world.  Don't be deceived by his mischievous smile, sunny demeanor and colorful tales - we will come to rue his dynasty.

In an ironic twist, a fully-covered Eric (McNett) edged out a shirtless Ben to take the 5th HPK spot.  Behind them, Eric Costanzo, Bruce Deltorchio, Andrius Zinkevichus, and Tim Hudyncia secured the next 5 positions.  Bob Capellini won the SS20Plus division in convincing style, while Mary Beth took the women's HPK title.  I don't usually comment on out-of-class competitors (it just encourages them), but rowers Patrick Riordan and Joshua Crosby piloted their sliding seat double to an astonishing 40:05 - the fastest time ever recorded on the Essex River.  Since Pat and I both train on Chebacco Lake, I claim a fair share of credit for their performance.

After the race, Hugh expressed some concerns about appearing in this blog.  I trust he has learned his lesson and won't make a habit of it in the future.

Having exhausted the inland waterways of New England, we're moving on to the open(ish) ocean.  The Sakonnet beckons.

Narrow River in Broad Strokes

Originally scheduled for April 4, the governors of the 10 mile Narrow River Race had granted us a stay of execution due to high winds and excessive whining about the excessive early-season length.  Having exhausted our appeals, however, it came time for our final paddle (with the exception of a sick Wesley, who exonerated himself half-way through the race).  Although the course stubbornly remained as long as ever, the three week reprieve at least supplied us with a pleasantly sunny day and a little extra time to fine-tune our pain thresholds.

Jan, Eric, and Tim - an inseparable trio I like to call the JET Pack.  What tomfoolery will they get into today?

The field was comprised of exactly the 14 paddlers that you'd expect at this race.  I proposed that we also just assign the finishing order that you'd expect and head straight to Oak Hill Tavern, but some reality-addicted sticklers insisted on empirical trials instead.  Wesley and Tim Dwyer called the skippers' meeting to order and supplied us with well-intentioned navigational tips, most of which amounted to variants of "watch out for the bottom".  We'd travel up-river 3 miles, head back down past the start to the mouth of the tidal river, and finish back at the start.  With some luck, we'd accomplish 90% of this afloat.

Via a progression of increasingly dire-sounding warnings about the impending start of the race, Wesley eventually counted us down to a rolling start.  Chris Chappell jumped out to an early lead, with Eric Costanzo in pursuit.  Jan Lupinski, leaving the gate as the favorite with better than 2-1 odds (I had twenty bucks on him myself), started conservatively on the left flank of the snarling pack.  Lacking torque at low RPMs, I eased up to race pace alongside Tim Dwyer.

Yet again, Tim lectures us on the importance of oral hygiene.

After clambering up several familiar rungs of the draft ladder, I was surprised to find myself grabbing hold of Bob Capellini's wake for a boost up to Wesley.  I figured Bob maybe knew something I didn't about an upcoming hotspot, so I ramped up my effort.  Off to my left, still well removed from the fray, I saw Jan moving like a tremendous machine towards the front.  I made a burst to pull past Wesley and hook onto Chris and Eric, with the hope that we three could hitch our wagons to Jan's runaway locomotive.

Recognizing Jan as a villain who must be fettered before he can do additional damage to our point series hopes, Eric Costanzo and I had discussed strategy before the race.  We developed a vigilante plan that was as brilliant as it was unreasonably optimistic:  Trick Chris into pulling us onto Jan's wash, discard him like an old air conditioner (after carefully draining him of environmental toxins, naturally), then work together to deliver a series of punishing intervals directly to Jan's ego.  Perhaps wanting to maintain plausible deniability, Eric didn't technically agree to any of this, but I could tell by the way his eyes glazed over during my Powerpoint presentation that he was on board.  Now we just had to execute.

All the way until mile 0.7, we were spot on plan.  As Chris settled in behind Jan, however, the unimaginable happened...  A catastrophic failure in the Eric-to-Chris latching mechanism left Eric and I to rely on our own over-taxed power plants.  I tried to stoke Eric into overdrive by shoveling derision on his fitness and stamina, but my position squarely behind him gave me no real moral leverage in this regard.  Eventually, a combination of guilt and desperation drove me to move ahead of Eric and take a turn pulling.  Jan eventually dropped Chris, but by that point the latter was at least a dozen boat lengths ahead of us.

Eric soon dropped off my starboard side, leaving me to reel in Chris on my own.  Not wanting to land him too green, I spent the next four miles patiently hauling in the big fella.  When I eventually pulled even with him, however, he still had quite a bit of fight left in him.  It took another mile or so before I could put him away - and even then, as I found afterwards, he lingered on just out of my periphery for another mile (while still keeping enough in the tank to beat off Eric in the final stretch).

I'd be remiss if I failed to address the most notorious characteristic of the Narrow River.  With the exception of a three mile up-and-back portion of the course when the river widens into a small lake, you could see the bottom sliding under your boat for vast stretches of the race.  So?  The water of Lake Tahoe (bear with me here) is so extraordinarily clear that you can often see objects on the lake bed even at depths of over 100 feet.  I can assure you, however, that were the water of the Narrow River miraculously replaced with Guinness, you'd still be able to see each and every pebble through the thin slick of delicious stout.  Also, the race would be a lot more popular.

Every few minutes, you'd hit a particularly shallow stretch of river, draining your speed and willpower in equal measures.  The first few times this happens you'll weave to and fro in search of an ever-elusive channel, but you soon realize that your energy would be better spent cursing Tim and Wesley.  Instead, you plow ahead through the morass - only changing course to avoid prospectors, imprudently discarded murder weapons, and the occasional bag of undrowned kittens.  With perseverance, you'd eventually return to water deep enough to wade in.

Chris and Eric play a medium-stakes game of cat and mouse (Photo courtesy Wesley Echols and SurfskiRacing.com).

With Chris behind me I could still see Jan far ahead, the distance reducing him to that awkward size somewhere between a mote and a speck.  Larger than a point, sure, but definitely smaller that a dot.  Not really mite-sized, but go ahead and use that as a point of reference.  Say 10% larger than a mite, but dressed in bright yellow.  In any event, I focused solely on Jan (without my glasses, I should point out, a mite-plus object is blurred to a subjective size of a diffuse splotch - but I recommend you stick with the objective reality of a mite-like Jan for your visualization purposes), letting Lupinski guide me through the twists of the Narrow River as it approached Narragansett Bay.  That's right...  I navigated by our Pole star.

I've been saving that one for years.

The final turn of the race is only marginally less notorious than the Narrow River's questionable legal status as a "navigable waterway".  Exhausted from 8 miles of racing, we're then asked to turn around a pole that's perilously close to the bank in the fastest-flowing part of the river.  I understand that the race organizers had originally wanted to place an osprey's nest on the pole so that we'd further have to fend off an enraged bird-of-prey, but the cost was prohibitive (call me next time - I got a guy).  Even knowing that it was unlikely that my eyes would be gouged out, I approached the turn with considerable trepidation.  Fortunately, I swung around the pole with no problems that you need to know about.

Mary Beth finished the way she started - mumbling something about the length of the damn race under her breath.

Although I seemed to have gained on Jan at the turn - knocking his lead to under a minute - the visions I had of hunting him down in the last couple of miles revealed themselves to be more of the "fevered" than "prescient" variety.  He steadily widened his lead in the final upstream stretch, ultimately finishing nearly 2 minutes ahead.  Behind me, a heroic battle for the final podium position was playing out as Chris successfully parried repeated attacks from a hard-charging Eric (check out Chris' video).  Bruce Deltorchio continued his strong early-season run by nudging out Tim Dwyer for 5th place.  Mary Beth remains unbeaten among women this season, but now owes Chris Sherwood a case of beer (you're a Schlitz man, right Chris?) for his untiring efforts on her behalf.

We're on my home turf next - the Essex River.  You may want to wear your goggles.  Remember... I got a guy.

Run of the Charles: Power Vacuum

With King Borys and Queen Beata having moved on to a better place, the Northeast surfski thrones sit vacant for the first time in many harvests.  With no heirs apparent, the upcoming season promises to be filled with deft strategic maneuvering, ferocious duels to the finish, and the occasional poisoning.  Fasten your footstraps.  Treacherous seas approach.

Just not literally.  The first full-field race of the post-B&B era would take place on the tranquil waters of the Charles River. (While the second race... well, that will also be on flat water.  But the third... uh, flat too.  We'll have to wait for roiling conditions until the fourth... unless of course the Sakonnet Race is glass-calm like last year.)  A crew of 25 skis showed up for the 6 mile course of the Run of the Charles - nearly all kayakers having sworn off the 9 and 19 mile courses as "too portagy".  Fresh off their impressive showings in Florida at the Shark Bite Challenge two weeks earlier, Craig Impens, Eric Costanzo, and Jan Lupinski were looking to devour a field of soft and pasty New Englanders - while those of us who stayed true to the North looked to defend our (until recently) frozen realm.

Rocky makes some last minute adjustments to what may be the world's oldest Huki.

The 6 mile down-and-back (followed by a little up-and-back) course would take us on a tour of the bridges of Suffolk County.  Wary of the Run of the Charles' tradition of snap starts, the veteran field loitered anxiously about the starting line waiting for the surprise countdown.  As a result, nearly everyone was facing the right direction when the 15 second warning was given.  Ten seconds later the contest was on.

In last year's race, I ruffled a few feathers while clawing my way to an advantageous position during a fevered initial sprint.  The ends may justify the means, but Machiavelli didn't have to race with the same set of guys week after week.  I took a more tactful (and less tactile) approach this year, starting out with a more measured cadence and vowing to work my way honorably up to the lead pack.  Finding myself momentarily trapped behind teenager Augstin Reboul and youthful-in-spirit Wesley Echols, rather than just muscling between them like I might have in the past, I instead muscled through while whistling nonchalantly.  That gives you blanket immunity.

Fortunately, we got started before Judgement commenced.

Once in clearer water, I caught a mild boost from Eric Schulz and a whopping assist from Chris Chappell (always one to pitch in a helping hand).  Chris managed to work us up to Eric Costanzo and an unfamiliar paddler in a classic V10L (that turned out to be Ben Pigott).  The lead pair of Craig and Jan had pulled away several minutes earlier, and Jan had managed to drop Craig sometime soon after that.  With Eric and Ben pulling, Chris and I hunkered in for a downstream ride.

As the field approached the final stretch to the first turn buoy, we saw two skis paddling effortlessly back upstream toward us.  It seemed inconceivable that anyone could have had such a colossal lead on us.  When I then discovered that the paddlers were Mark Ceconi and Sean Milano... I most definitely did not ramp my incredulity to flying-pig levels, but rather silently congratulated those illustrious fellows on their remarkable off-season improvements.  I later discovered that Mark and Sean weren't actually registered for the race, but were sent off early to clear the course of mines.

By the turn-around, it was pretty clear that unless Jan stopped for a picnic on the bank of the Charles, he had a lock on first place.  So you can imagine how dumbfounded I was afterwards when he told me that not only has he not been training, this was actually the first time he's ever even seen a surfski.  Craig was firmly in second place at the turn, but his lead over our little pack didn't look insurmountable.

Ben took the turn very wide and Eric made a tactical error by finding himself trapped on the outside of the turn.   After some maneuvering, I managed to gain a boat length and put myself in a position to get on Ben's stern wash.  I had spent the better part of the first half of the race drafting Chris, Ben and Eric, so it was difficult (but not impossible) to feel aggrieved when Eric leeched onto my starboard to catch a ride of his own on the way back upriver.  We had apparently dropped Chris before the turn.

I've read that the comfortable personal space distance varies considerably from culture to culture.  Evidently, New Jersey is one of those locales where that distance is - at least for someone with a more repressed upbringing - on the claustrophobic end of the scale.  Eric wasn't so much side-drafting me as initiating docking procedures.  I looked to my right a couple of times to discover that I had actually been paddling his boat.  I kept waiting to be boarded, just hoping that I wouldn't find myself in a "take no prisoners!" scenario.

In Eric's defense, I found later that he was experiencing steering issues due to improperly threaded rudder lines.  And, other than the mental anguish I suffered from being the ongoing target of a high-stakes game of "I'm not touching you...", I can't say that his close paddling had any impact on my race.

Sure, it can be a bit annoying to have Eric around all the time.  But he'd take a bullet for me.

About a mile back up the Charles towards the start, Eric whispered conspiratorially in my ear that we should work together to hunt down Craig.  I'm not sure why he focused on the guy who was two places in front of us rather than the one just ahead, but since Eric appeared to have enough cognitive function left to actually form a plan (fatigue had forced me to retreat into reactive lizard-brain mode), who was I to question his ingenious gambit?  We angled slightly away from Ben to take a direct line towards Craig, perhaps a half-dozen boat lengths ahead.

We were almost immediately separated by an oncoming pair of plastic kayaks (an impressive feat - akin to splitting the atom), and that set the tone for the rest of our short-lived and pathetic effort.  I managed to limp back onto Ben's wash, but it wasn't long before he dropped us.  A half-mile later, Eric slipped back from his outrigger position on my starboard side to latch on to my stern.  I checked back periodically to make sure he was comfortable until one time... sniff... I saw only my undisturbed wake.

Eric and I are comparable paddlers, although we have very different strengths in a ski.  Whereas I thrive on the delicate elegance of flat water racing, he's more comfortable in the bare-knuckles world of the open ocean - particularly if it's a downwind kind of brawl.  Last season I was faster when conditions were, say, "moderate" or better.  Eric was faster when things got any messier.  Based on his performance on the Charles, however, it appears that Lesher-Costanzo crossover threshold has shifted from "moderate" to "dead calm".

I spent the last mile and a half a steady 4 boat lengths behind Ben.  I was too exhausted from having dropped Eric to mount a serious challenge.  Ben wasn't going to catch Craig, and I wasn't going to catch Ben.  And Jan had already finished.  So that was the top 5: Jan, Craig, Ben, me, and Eric.  Bruce Deltorchio had a great race to finish 6th, followed by Chris, Tims Dwyer and Hudyncia, and Eric Schulz to round out the top 10.  Mary Beth and Leslie Chappell finished 1 and 2 in the women's division.  I was a little disappointed in missing the podium, but I found ample solace in the Capellinis' superb pulled pork and Chris Sherwood's delightfully hoppy coffee.

Tim may have taken this round, but from Wesley's expression I'm guessing he's working the long con...

Jan threw down the gauntlet with a decisive thrashing of the field.  Will anyone rise to his challenge?  Or will we meekly pick up his glove, dust it off, and apologetically return it with "I think you dropped this, m'lord."?  I don't know about you guys, but I've been honing my paddling skills for combat on the Narrow River.

I'm also preparing some House Lupinski banners.  Just in case.