What Was Your Work Out Today?

Sunday's usually rest day, but the club had a Moonlight Row party. We took out the barge, which is a sweep rowing (one oar per person) craft that's basically like rowing your living room: A big rectangle, with rowers on each side, as stable as your living room, and about as high performance. We put a bunch of battery lights and glow sticks on it, and about a dozen of us headed out after dark, with the almost-full moon, on a beautiful clear night.

This is what it looked like sitting at the dock in daylight, with the oars pulled in rather than fully extended ready to row.



I haven't swept in an age, but ended up sitting starboard stroke, with a recent-grad collegiate coxswain/rower sitting port stroke next to me, because we're a sculling club and almost no one else much knows how to sweep. 😆

We only rowed around 5500m, but went at it with some gusto (barge still performs like your living room . . . .). I did a decent job blistering up my right hand (outside hand) on the end of the club's beat-up wooden-handle sweep oar (I got an old spoon/macon rather than a hatchet even - prehistoric, practically - and it looked like someone had gnawed pieces out of the handle-end). Had a fine time.

Potluck snacks after.

Djproulx wrote: »

@wunderkindking - Cool picture. That SUP was at capacity!
@AnnPT77 - I'll bet moving the barge was a lot of work, and I'm guessing the lighting might not have met Coast Guard regulations. Looks like fun though!

In absolute fairness, it's a BIG SUP, and the dogs are little.


Super good time, though.

Djproulx wrote: »

@wunderkindking - Cool picture. That SUP was at capacity!
@AnnPT77 - I'll bet moving the barge was a lot of work, and I'm guessing the lighting might not have met Coast Guard regulations. Looks like fun though!

In this particular case, I think we were pretty visible, with several people wearing fake eyeglasses made out of glowsticks, glowsticks on oar handles, some lighted necklaces, party lights on the gunwales, a good number of the rowers wearing campout-type headlamps, etc.

I suspect any powerboater who was out would've been more likely to mistake us for an alien spacecraft (or multi-legged space creature), than recognize us as a rowing craft, though, especially given that this particular craft is - as you could see - pretty odd looking even without party decor. We only saw a couple of other boats, and that closer to dusk rather than full dark.

Here's a photo, with everyone else's faces anonymized since I didn't ask their permission to post, me in front (which is stern) at right.



That said, we did have red and green side lights on the proper sides of the barge, which is close to the legit requirement for a boat of the barge's length, plus flashlights on board that could be used in the way indicated for shorter sail/row/paddle craft. (The photo above doesn't include the red/green lights, which are blocked from view.)

In practice, we generally follow the night-lighting rules that apply to non-power craft of shorter length, and hope for the best if we meet an enforcement officer. There exist special lights for use on regular rowing shells that are red on one side, green on the other, technically meet the regs (or at least come close) but are workable on a narrow boat (even the 8s are only about 18"-ish wide, and a mere few inches wide within a few feet of bow and stern where lights need to be placed).

Honestly, the Coast Guard and state regs are a little weird in general, when it comes to rowing craft: The regs don't seem to have contemplated our existence. We're human powered of course, and there are some exceptions for non-powered boats at shorter lengths, but even the ways regs apply for some longer canoes and kayaks are a little odd.

When it comes to rowing craft, some of the regs for all craft over X length make zero sense. (For example, according to what I was told in my boating safety classes, craft over 26 feet (I think it was) require a big ol' sign someplace warning about rules for oil and waste discharge. A rowing 8, with 8 rowers and a coxswain, is 60 feet long. A quad or four is around 40 feet long, a double around 30 feet, even a racing single will be around that 26 foot length +/-. None of us discharge much oil, and only discharge waste if someone throws a kleenex overboard (which we don't, at least not intentionally). We don't have that required sign, ever. 🤷‍♀️)

The barge is slow, but maybe faster than one would think. Even with only around 12 rowers (it seats 16), we were getting 500m splits in the 4-5 minutes range; 2 minutes would be regionally competitive for regular shells among age-group rowers of most of our age. That's not bad, for rowing a living room, if you ask me. I think only one person in the boat was under 30, at least half of us over 60 (one in his 80s, the guy one seat behind me and across the aisle).