Jamestown Double Beaver: Gnawing Fear

The Jamestown Double Beaver has had a bumpy ride over the past few years as race director Tim Dwyer - suffering delusions of downwind grandeur - monkeyed with the established course.  In fact, 2015 and 2018 were utterly bereft of beavers.  I'm not saying deviation from tradition caused last year's lightning storm, but I did hear rumblings to that effect from several lightly-singed paddlers.  Just as earth's gravity will eventually divert some wayward asteroid to a collision that spells our fiery doom, the weight of tradition was bound to eventually swing us back to the standard Double Beaver route.  Fiery doom might be implausible in this case, but we've all seen Jan Lupinski get into nuttier scrapes on the water.

This year we'd be racing the lite version of the classic course - a 10 mile out-and-back that would take us from Conanicut Yacht Club, past the House on the Rock, around Bull Point, and across open water to the turn-around at the bell buoy off Beavertail Point.  With a 10 knot wind from the southwest, we'd have an upwind-downwind situation on the long stretch between Bull Point and the buoy.  Doubtless the winner would be determined within that expanse.

Although new to the sport, Melissa has already perfected the subtle art of psyching out your opponents via a last-minute rudder change.

Fearing impending bad weather, Tim assembles the hard-top canopy for his ski.

The top five competitors from the Ride the Bull race two weeks earlier would be reprising their roles in this race.  I just hoped that everyone would stick to the script.  I didn't want any of these guys improvising their way into top billing.  There could only be one star (which, coincidentally, was also the consensus of the reviewers of my ill-advised second grade talent show solo rendition of "Ebony and Ivory" - a production that one critic quipped "set back race relations by 88 years").  In retrospect, however, I'm not sure that I should have taken the opportunity during the captain's meeting to introduce Jan, Chris Quinn, Chris Laughlin, and Tim Dwyer as my "supporting cast".  That's the kind of thing that got Caesar into trouble.  Mary Beth, on the other hand, was hoping for a major rewrite in which RTB champ Melissa Meyer's role would be reduced to a bit part.

Without Wesley at the race, we milled about for a good 45 minutes off the Yacht Club pier before eventually realizing that someone else would have to count us down to the start.  Although Tim modestly downplays his abilities in this regard, once he figured out that he had been inadvertently waiting for his heart rate to get to 0, he showed a real flair for marking off seconds.  With Tim's enthusiastic kick-off, we were on our way.

While Kurt may look intimidating, inside he's just a great big teddy bear operating a complicated series of levers and pulleys.  Quite possibly with diabolical intent.

My strategy - and I use the word in a sense so loose that it's likely to slip right off - was to paddle hard and pray that nobody else could do better.  Also, I sacrificed a farm animal.  Not in person, but via one of those Give A Goat/Take a Goat charity programs.  His name was Señor Bumpers.  They sent me some charred entrails from the burnt offering as a keepsake, but given the ultimate result of the race, I think eating them with some pasta might not have gone over well with the gods.

With a solid start that had me convinced that I was the victim of some inscrutable prank, I quickly found myself alone in the lead.  True, Chris L was running parallel to me on an outside line, but I was pretty sure he'd soon fall back to join the others, tittering about my upcoming humorous comeuppance.  He was clearly just a decoy to set me at ease.  As expected, when our lines converged near the House on the Rocks, he joined his fellow rascals behind me.

Rounding Bull Point, we were faced with that make-or-break 3.5 mile upwind stretch to the turn-around buoy.  Fortunately, we had a modest outbound current to help bear the slogging load.  I put my head down as far as was possible (best not to see exactly how far you have left) and started the long trek.  I still wasn't sure what the trailing band of merry pranksters had in store for me, but I'd try to have the last laugh by just staying out front.

You know how you'll be walking alone through the woods and you'll have the sensation that someone is following you, but you don't want to look back to check because you've been experiencing severe vertigo when you twist your neck and you're afraid if you do look back you'll lose your balance and fall sideways into some brambles, but then you eventually get so weirded out that you do look back and you see a completely shaved shirtless guy 20 feet behind, chasing you while wielding a bizarre whirling truncheon of some sort?  So you can empathize with my terror.

My pursuer, of course, was a demented Chris Q.  And based on my impression of a vague Polish shape behind him, he had brought Jan along for support.  As we made our way towards Beavertail Light, I periodically checked back to make sure I was still using the correct pronoun to indicate our progress.  Always, oui.  The waves had been generally head-on over the initial couple miles of the upwind haul, but the conditions became more confused the nearer we approached to the rocky shore of Beavertail Point.  The random undulations generated by the reflected waves were manageable, but every so often they'd be supplemented by boat wakes that somehow warped the space-time continuum to add a tricky 4th dimensional displacement to the mix.  At one particularly sketchy point, I remembered being inside out next Tuesday.

The agitated waters off the point had one positive effect - they disengaged Chris and Jan from my tail.  Given the relentless pace I was maintaining, it seemed safe to believe that without the largess of my draft, the pair would immediately drop by the wayside.  In fact, be swept by the wayside.  Inexplicably, they instead surged to pull even going into the buoy turn.  I briefly entertained the notion that my pace was actually somewhat shy of relentless (maybe just "dogged" or "unforgiving"?), but my ego quickly swatted down that absurd hypothesis.  Chris and Jan were defying logic, end of story.

After bashing into the waves for the last half-hour, I was looking forward to the inevitable downwind paradise.  It wasn't quite the nirvana I had hoped for, but then again, I can't say I've really put in the soul-scrubbing necessary to prepare myself for the ultimate reward.  Nevertheless, there were plenty of good rides available provided that you were willing to work for them.  Over the next couple of miles, the the three of us traded leads while weaving amongst each other chasing bumps.  Jan eventually asserted himself as the alpha surfer, slowly widening his lead as he hopped on runners that Chris and I missed.  For a while it looked as if Chris might also outdistance me on this leg, but with a half-mile left before Bull Point, he started to flag and I was able to pass him.

Entering the protected 1.5 mile finishing stretch, Jan had a lead of perhaps a dozen lengths.
Hoping to whittle this down to nothing before he even realized I was closing, I honed my technique to as sharp an edge as it would take (I'd estimate halfway between butter knife and wooden spoon) and started carving ragged strokes through the bay.  I tried to hide my progress behind moored boats so as to not alarm the skittish leader, but when I got to within a few lengths, Jan must have spotted me.  Or perhaps heard my death rattle (dammit - I should have paid that extra $15 for the sonic dampener).  In any event, he picked up his pace.  For the last half mile, I had no real hope of catching Jan, but by sacrificing a few million neurons to oxygen deprivation I was able to maintain a credibly threatening pursuit.  No reason why we shouldn't both suffer.

Jan finished several lengths ahead, hopefully cursing me for pushing needlessly through the finish.  Chris Q pulled in a few moments later to take third.  As at the Battle of the Bay, Chris L and Tim rounded out the top five.  Melissa looked strong in taking the women's title (in the eighth overall spot), with Mary Beth in second.

The top paddlers were awarded beautiful prints of the eponymous lighthouse of the race.  I'm going to hang mine in my bedroom so that when I awake from nightmares of rougher years off Beavertail Point, I can keep screaming for a few extra seconds.  Raffle prizes included spiffy Y Knot hats (produced by Alyce and Gaelyn) and sandwiches.  Everyone went home with something.  Bob Wright's new hobby is apparently finding odds-and-ends in his basement and converting them into elaborate trophies.  I don't think that's actually a thing, but if it'll finally keep him out of the cock-fighting dens of Woonsocket, more power to him.  By correctly predicting his race time, Kurt Hatem was the first to benefit from Bob's newfound passion.

Bob's a whiz when it comes to working on all things mechanical, but complained that he was having a hell of a time figuring out his new microwave.

To the victor go the spoils.  Afterwards, a tearful Jan confessed that all he really wanted was for certain insensitive clods to stop poking fun at his hilarious accent.  I may have added the "hilarious".  If he had actually said "hilarious" - just imagine how funny that would have sounded!  Say it in your head now.  See?

Coming up on July 6th is Eric McNett's Casco Bay Challenge.  In a continuing tradition, four participants will be randomly selected to get hopelessly lost.  Don't miss out on that chance to finally see Nova Scotia!  Register at PaddleGuru.  If the current forecast holds, it should be a cracker downwind blast.  And if you don't already have July 13th circled on your calendar, that's presumably because you haven't actually used (or even seen) a real calendar since 2004.  Of course, that's the date of New England's greatest aquatic suffer-fest, the Blackburn Challenge.  Registration closes on Wednesday, July 10th at noon.

One last item.  Who amongst us couldn't use a tune-up on our paddling technique?  Or, in some instances, a complete tear-down and rebuild?  Ian Black, a world-class South African paddler sponsored by Stellar, will be giving a two-hour surfski clinic at 4pm on July 11th - just in time for the Blackburn.  Cost is $50.  Contact Michael Duffield (father of Sam) of Newbury Kayak for registration and additional details (newburykayak@gmail.com, 978-465-0312).

I've just been reminded by my editor that with the Blackburn Challenge approaching, it's time to start tapering.  As such, I should maintain blog intensity, but reduce volume dramatically.  Oops.