By now we're all familiar with the origin story of Ride the Bull. Concerned that surfski races were just too sedate to land a lucrative ESPN live coverage contract, Tim Dwyer and Wesley Echols devised a treacherous coastline course guaranteed to have viewers slavering at the carnage. Taking a cue from Big Tobacco, they figured that with all the youngsters recruited via the sexy publicity, they could afford to gradually kill off their best customers. It took them a few years of tinkering with the course, but they finally arrived at a sustainable attrition rate. Although Wesley had taken over sole directorship some years back, his conscience finally got the better of him. He handed the reigns over to Tim and myself this year. Proud to carry on the tradition, we summoned paddlers to Fort Wetherill for the annual Narragansett Bay culling extravaganza.
Before getting down to the race itself, let's take a quick detour to discuss my 2022 fitness strategy. I've started to incorporate more cross training this season, folding in healthy doses of cycling and running to my time on the water. In general, athletes might adopt such an approach to promote sport-specific recovery, enhance motivation, or avoid overuse injuries. My principle motivation, however, was to extend the life of the 20 year old neoprene shorts I paddle in. If I didn't seriously curtail my bucket time, a mid-race disintegration (think Thanos finger snap) was all but inevitable. As part of the preservation effort, I bought a new road bike this spring.
While I enjoyed riding a couple of times a week, I recently realized that although I was getting an aerobic benefit from this cross training, I should also be looking to enhance skills that would also be useful on a surfski. With this in mind, the day before the race I found a flat and straight section on a country road to practice my remounts. Moments later as I lay sprawled in the ditch alongside that road, I couldn't help but think that there should have been more planning on the dismount phase of the drill. First off, a bed of poison ivy probably wasn't the ideal landing zone. In my defense, though, even had I identified a more suitable target area beforehand, it would have been difficult to navigate to it while rag dolling along the shoulder. Which brings me to the second major deficiency in my dismount maneuver. In retrospect, decelerating to a stop while on the bike would have made a lot more sense. There's a reason (perhaps a few) they don't make brake pads out of human skin. My third and final planning faux pas was not alerting area residents that a drill was in progress. To an unknowing observer - say an elderly woman on her mid-morning walk - it can be difficult to differentiate between a true 911 emergency (like a cyclist wiping out and disappearing off the side of the road) and a minor training snafu (same). Next thing you know, you might be asking the EMTs if they have anything for acute embarrassment.
I'm in excruciating itchiness, but otherwise fine - my body absorbed most of the impact. Just some minor scrapes and bruises. Also snapped off part of my shifter assembly, but I'm told it will grow back.
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| Paddlers are easing back into the intimate camaraderie we had before COVID, but we're not quite there with the traditional pre-race huddle. |
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| I'm not exactly sure why we were roasting Chris, but Tim had some of the best oceanographer-related zingers I'd ever heard. I'm never going to hear "Woods Hole" again without laughing. |
Back to Rhode Island. Lest we get too big for our britches (that's assuming they're still in one piece), every year we order a world-class paddler from the ICF to compete in at least one of our New England races. You never know if you'll get a Sean Rice, an Austin Kieffer, or a Nate Humberston, but we've never been anything less than completely humiliated at our relative incompetence. Hold on. I take that back. One year they had a shortage and pawned a Jan Lupinski off on us. Oh sure, he probably won, but nobody wanted to quit the sport afterwards. This year we got the Sean Brennan model - a real bargain since we only had to pay freight charges from New Jersey. We last saw Sean at the 2021 Sakonnet Surfski Race, immediately after which the local used surfski market crashed due to the glut of sellers.
Although it seemed improbable that Sean would be seriously challenged, if anyone could be forgiven for dreaming above their station, it'd be fellow out-of-towners Rob Jehn and Ed Joy. Rob has been repeatedly kicking the beloved local favorite in the groin this season and yet for some reason we keep letting him come back. Although Ed has some mileage on him (including serious off-road ventures while a younger man, as he told us at lunch), he's got a rebuilt drive train and the best rough-water navigation system money can buy. And as the two-time defending champion, he wasn't about to let a "candy-ass teenager" like Rob beat him on this course. I figured.
We're not even halfway through the list of outside barbarians that stormed the gates of Fort Wetherill. For weeks, Rob had been frightening me with tales of Anthony Colasurdo's ferocity from shared NJ training sessions. New York's John Hair is always a wily competitor, but this year he's taken things to a new level - creating a bogus Strava feed designed to make it look like he hasn't been training much. Finally, Epic Kayaks muckety-muck Bruce Poacher would be paddling a double with Eric Costanzo (yet another Jersey boy). Bruce flew his parents over from South Africa and then drove them up from Tennessee so that they'd have a chance to apologize for the cold-hearted manner in which their other son (Ross) had eviscerated me in the 2019 Blackburn. That's the kind of thoughtful gesture that makes everyone love the (non-Ross) Poachers. Also, Bruce brought snappy Epic hats for everyone.
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| I just found out about the "Psychedelic" setting on my GoPro. Groovy. |
The area we use at the park also serves as a base for scuba diving certification, so for once we weren't the silliest looking bunch of weirdos in the parking lot. We were however, the baldest, with nearly half the paddling crew opting to redirect our supply of testosterone to, uh... more critical areas. Eyebrows, ears, noses, etc. Behind more than a few diving masks, I noticed the distinct glint of envy.
With an assist from Sean's encyclopedic knowledge of the navigational markers of Narragansett Bay (get that guy on Jeopardy!), Tim deftly guided us through the 8.8 mile course at the captains meeting. Starting from West Cove, we'd motor west to round a rocky island just inside Mackerel Cove, head out into the bay to turn on bell buoy G7 (recently refitted with a state-of-the-art Hayes-Kendall "Monsoon IV" free-swinging clapper, as Sean helpfully informed us), continue northeast past West Cove and the House on the Rock to G11 (criminally outdated with a Maritime East "Flop-About" dangler), and return to the mouth of West Cove. Just to make sure we got it right, Tim asked that we then repeat the loop a second time. After that, we'd be rewarded with an extra leg that would take us directly back to G7 for one more glorious bell recital before returning to the finish.
The launch area was congested with floating weeds and scuba students (almost always grounds for an automatic failure), so once we picked our way through to open water, we carefully checked each other's rudders for tangles of regulator hoses. We soon made our way next door to West Cove and lined up for the countdown start. Tim's gotten so good at counting backwards that he earns a little extra dough on the side as a test subject for anesthesiologist training. Based on general demeanor I suspect he may have taken a few too many hits of ether over the years, but on the brighter side he never has to worry about his tonsils, appendix, or gall bladder giving him any problems. He was in fine form today, though. We were underway exactly 54 seconds after the one minute warning.
Knowing we'd soon be making a hard right turn around a particularly solid looking rock at the mouth of the cove, I had lined up on the left side of the pack to avoid any temptation to heroically cut things close. Struggling to get by Tim on the outside, I couldn't lend much attention to what was happening in the thick of things over to the right. Based on what I saw after clearing the turn (and Tim) and angling towards the point marking the entrance to Mackerel Cove, however, I can only assume that what had been happening was a whole lot of cheating. That's the only rational explanation for the fact that scarcely a minute into the race I had already lost contact with the first 5 boats. Sean, Ed, Rob, Bruce & Eric, and Anthony were well out in front.
Once clear of the well-protected start cove, the true nature of the race conditions were revealed. Between the brisk northwest wind, swells from the south, boat traffic, and refraction from the rocky coastline, there were waves traveling in pretty much any direction you wanted. Conanicut Island was blocking most of the 12-15 mph wind, so none of the legs would be an upwind slog. Technical conditions, but not overly demanding. I figured it would give competitors with years of varied ocean paddling (like Sean, Ed, and Tim) the benefit. I have more than a decade of open water experience under my belt (and, quite often, over my head), but by stubbornly refusing to learn much from this exposure, I remain mid-pack in my abilities. Perhaps by waterlogged osmosis I had absorbed skills enough to catch newcomer Anthony, however.
Amazingly, there seemed to be some merit to this hypothesis. Anthony had dragged me around most of the Narrow River Race a couple of months earlier, but in livelier conditions I was rapidly closing his early lead. Being in a more stable boat doubtless helped. Turning around Southwest Point into Mackerel Cove, I took a tight line inside him (only semi-heroically close to the rocks) and moved safely into 5th place. Now all I had to do was linger close enough to the pursuit group (Ed, Rob, and the double) to pick off any exhausted stragglers.
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| You'd never have expected it from him, but as we passed in opposite directions at turns I heard a steady stream of motivational obscenities directed at the "gutless maggot" up front by drill sergeant Bruce. |
At the completion of the first lap, the pack ahead extended their gap while demonstrating an uncommon degree of cohesion. The two smaller boats and the larger double appeared to be atomically linked - the H2O of the paddling world, so to speak. I'm working towards a spectacularly tortured metaphor/pun here, so bear with me. Here's the premise. Water is known as the "universal solvent" because almost everything dissolves in it. But "solvent" also means "having sufficient funds to pay one debts". So if the group is universally solvent, they have unlimited resources. Which explains why they were showing no signs of fatigue! I spent about an hour unsuccessfully trying to craft this harebrained premise into a Shakespearean turn of phrase that would at best elicit a collective groan, and would more probably elicit a collective "Close Tab". I mostly write to amuse myself, and I failed at even that. I did come up with the hilarious-to-me phrase "pithy apothegm" while brainstorming, however, so it wasn't a complete loss.
Enough self-indulgence. Let's get back to the actual topic of this report. The advantages of liquidity! The inseparable Fluid Crew were nimble and flexible, while I plodded behind, all of my assets frozen in stodgy long-term investments (like life insurance, which I might well dip into sooner rather than later). Sorry. I could've sworn there'd be a payoff in doggedly pursuing this angle.
The remainder of my race overflowed with adventure and excitement (look for the Netflix miniseries in October), but since I've wasted so much space on tangents, I'll distill it to the essentials. Periodic checks on Anthony after each turn revealed that I was maintaining a solid grasp on 5th place. As the pursuit pack pulled further head of me, it became difficult to tell how close-knit they remained, but at the final discordant turn on G11, I could see that Rob and Ed had dissociated themselves from Bruce & Eric. The singles would struggle for supremacy over the final couple of miles, with Rob out-sprinting Ed for the silver. In winning 4 minutes earlier, Sean had established a new course record of 1:11:56. Finishing 4th overall about a minute behind Ed, Bruce & Eric were forced to share the doubles crown, leading to quite the fracas in the parking lot. We had a couple of fatigue-based DNFs, but a 100% survival rate. We'll have to try harder next year.
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| I guarantee you that in reality, the field wasn't nearly this photogenic. |
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