Another 60-mile Adventure Row in the books!
Tracy, Maureen, and Dy pulled up at Lazygut Thrumcaps in Jericho Bay, a few miles from the end of their three-day, 60-mile adventure row.
When Maureen reached out to say she had a “bonkers” idea for an adventure row in mid-September, I thought Yes! I can’t wait to hear this idea.
The idea was simple enough, if a little crazy. She would row her newly completed Angus Rowcruiser (which she built herself!) up the coast from Kittery. Her friend Tracy would drive up from Massachusetts to meet me in Bristol. Tracy and I would row out to rendezvous with Maureen somewhere in the ocean swells off the pointy granite tip of Pemaquid peninsula, and then continue east up the coast with her, providing some moral support and companionship for the middle section of her thru-row attempt on the Maine Island Trail.
I loved this plan. I went right to work creating a spreadsheet of mileages between different island campsites along the way, coming up with Plans A, B, and C (depending on the conditions). I knew there would be a speed differential between Maureen in her single and us in the double, but I figured we could just ease up in the double, maybe take longer breaks or something, and still stay together without too much trouble.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from years of planning and executing long distance rows, it’s that rarely do things go exactly according to plan.
When Maureen had to make an emergency landing in the surf at Reid State Park and broke one of her oarlocks in the resulting kerfluffle, our three-person adventure row quickly became a four-person adventure row. Though shore support crews don’t often have the skills to suddenly jump in the boat, Maureen’s friend Dy (a Rowing to Wild adventure row veteran) gamely agreed to be our fourth. She packed her belongings into borrowed dry bags, and waved goodbye to the mainland. Our other Savo 650 double subbed in for the wounded Rowcruiser, and we embarked upon Plan D.
Setting out from Round Pond in Bristol early on a Saturday morning, we rowed across the glistening blue mirror of Muscongus Bay, weaving in between islands and ledges, taking strong pulls on the oars and gliding cleaning across the smooth water between strokes. Tracy was with me in Mursu that day, and we were well-matched in size and strength, like a good pair of oxen. It was easy to fall in step with her stroke, and she adjusted to the Finnish geometry of the boat with ease. Maureen steered Norppa with expert attention, keeping the two boats together. Dy kept us entertained with her indefatigable good spirits. At breaks we would drift together and the meditative quiet of rowing would be temporarily replaced with good-natured ribbing and squeals of laughter.
After a couple hours I began thinking about a place to stop for a stretch break. I saw what looked like a perfect little sandy shoal, exposed by the low tide. What a romantic place to stop for a few minutes and get out of the boats to stretch our legs! An ephemeral place that would be covered by the tide in a few more hours, but now shone in the warm sun. I’m afraid my imagination ran away with me, for upon closer inspection the little “sandy” landing spot was actually cobbles, and despite the gentleness of the swells, there was too much wave action there to land safely. I aimed for another spot with slightly less wave action, but many MORE seaweed-covered rocks. We hobbled out onto the slippery rocks and stood, precariously, as we drank and gobbled fruit snacks and leapt and thrashed to save the boats from crashing too hard against the rocks with each passing swell. It was a small miracle that no boats or bones were broken during that rest stop. Lesson learned: a shoal of that size is too small to create effective protection from the swell; the waves simply wrapped around it.
After we were safely back in the boats and away from the shoal, I joked “I chose that terrible place on purpose, to make sure you’d be excited to get back into the boats and row some more!”
We rowed steadily through the afternoon, as the sea breeze picked up and made for two- and three-foot choppy seas. We were happy to reach Muscle Ridge and duck out of the wind, into a serene sunny stillness amongst the little islands of that archipelago, one of my favorite places along the entire coast. Finding a sandy beach out of the wind, we finally had a good rest stop with the boats safe and the footing solid. We relaxed for a bit, draping ourselves across sunbaked boulders.
Five long, tired miles straight north brought us finally to Sheep and Monroe Islands, both owned by Maine Coast Heritage Trust. Being only a short distance from the harbor at Owl’s Head - short enough that people often canoe over - the campsites on these islands are often in use. The site on Monroe Island was in use, and two other parties were on Sheep Island as well. But, we were able to put our tents at the lovely, private tent platform site on the northeast corner of Sheep without infringing upon the other groups.
We had rowed nearly 30 miles since leaving Round Pond, and it felt like it. The tough thing about row-camping on tidal water is that there is no rest for the weary. You can’t just pull the boats up (they’re too heavy), and you can’t leave them at the water’s edge while you regain your strength because the water’s edge is in constant motion, either coming up or going down depending on the tide. There’s nothing for it but to summon some extra reserve of energy you didn’t know you had, empty the boats of all their gear, and haul them up above the high tide line. Only then may you throw yourself down and breathe a sigh of relief that all the hard parts are over.
Our exhaustion was nothing that some dry clothes and a hot meal couldn’t cure. The sunset glowed magenta and tangerine to our left as we sat out of the wind on the pebble beach, eating and chatting. Coyotes sang out from somewhere very close (we could swear they were on the island!) as the sun set, and darkness fell quickly. We were bundled into our tents, cozy in our sleeping bags and fast asleep in record time.
The next day, we rowed across the western channel of Penobscot Bay on gleaming swells that gently lifted the boats up and down as we skimmed across. Fog lurked behind us, spreading out from Owls Head and north towards Islesboro, but it never caught up with us. As we approached the western entrance of the Fox Island Thorofare, we ducked behind Drunkard Ledge and Fiddler Ledge, keeping well out of the path of the state ferry out of Rockland that came up behind us and chugged past on its way to North Haven. Rowing through the narrow passage between North Haven and Vinalhaven, we admired the many fine summer “cottages,” with their fancy docks and well-kept sailboats and runabouts bobbing at the moorings. I especially liked the name of one sailboat - the Skitterygusset. I told Dy, who was rowing with me that day, that the silly word should be her trail name. She liked the Skittery part but not the gusset.
As boats motored past us, their skippers raising their arms in friendly waves, I confided in Dy that as a rower, I struggle to know what to do when a fellow boater waves at me. I want to return the gesture, and used to drop my oars without thinking and attempt to wave back, only to have my blades be caught and held by the water, causing the oar handles to ram into my body, sending knees and elbows flying. I would end up looking as if I were having some sort of involuntary fit that might require medical attention.
So after having that happen several times in my early years of open water sculling, I wised up and determined that I must keep my hands on the oars and acknowledge the wave with some other motion (since almost always - and thankfully so - the boats pass by far enough way that shouting “Hello!” isn’t really practical). The only motion available to me, without upsetting the rowing, is a sort of violent nod of the head, which I hope is abrupt enough that the sailors’ eyes will pick up on the movement, despite its being a relatively small movement to notice against the vastness of the sea. But it feels both inadequate and ridiculous.
Dy listened patiently to all this, then said she had an idea. She explained how we would, at exactly the right part of the stroke and in exact synchronicity with each other, grab both our oar handles with one hand, wave with the other, and then return to our rowing without missing a stroke.
We practiced. We rowed along and waited for the right boatful of friendly people to pass us. A sailboat came along with two men and a woman in the cockpit, and they all waved. “Okay…now!” commanded Dy. Right hand grab both handles, left hand wave, left hand grab its oar handle back, and catch! to start the next stroke. We executed our synchronized wave perfectly! The sailors looked on with slightly confused expressions (which is not so different from the way sailors always look at rowers), and then turned back to their sailing, apparently unimpressed or perhaps unsettled by the odd amount of enthusiasm and effort we’d put into our reply.
Soon we reached Calderwood Island, and had a decision to make. Call it a day and camp here for the night, or row on for ten to fifteen miles more to reach a campsite somewhere east of Stonington, possibly even all the way to Marshall Island. It was approaching 1 pm, and we’d rowed a little less than 15 miles. The sun-soaked island beckoned, with its tidy south-facing beach offering the perfect spot for landing. In the end, it wasn’t a difficult decision to make. When the universe hands you a wild Maine island, all to yourself, on a glorious mid-September day, it would be ridiculous, perhaps even ungrateful, to row on.
We unloaded our gear and deployed the inflatable beach rollers to haul the boats up past the high tide line. And then we were lazy in the sun. Over the next couple hours, in no particular hurry, we put up the tents, changed clothes, bathed in the sea, changed again, ate snacks, laid down, and finally, explored the trails around the island, stopping to climb trees and lay beneath them, looking up from through the moss-draped branches to the deep blue heavens as silence and stillness pressed down upon us like a dream.
Later, we ate chili and cornbread and sat on the still-warm stones of the beach as the sky faded from rose to lavender to navy blue. The stars glimmered up one by one, and the pale swath of the Milky Way seeped out from the darkness directly overhead as we talked about things we could make sense of (our children growing up) and things we couldn’t (the chaos of modern life).
The fabulous weather continued into Monday, the last day of our trip. We rowed without any fuss across Penobscot Bay’s eastern channel, coming close by charming Stonington and continuing east into Jericho Bay. Maureen and Dy were back together in Norppa, this time with Dy in stroke and Maureen steering from bow. Gone were the rolling breaks of Day One, when we had taken breaks expedition-style, one rower at a time while the boats continued moving forward. Today, every break was an all-stop, letting the boats drift as we chatted about ice cream (yes, this was the chief topic at every break that day).
When we were only a few miles from our take-out point at Naskeag Point in Brooklin, we stopped for our last leg stretch at a small set of islands called Lazygut Thrumcaps. The tide was just right to expose the cream-colored sand that fills the narrow guts between each Thrumcap. We landed on the sand and looked up into the dark moss-draped branches towering above the islets’ steep granite skirts. The steep sides and dark spruce trees created a slight sensation of a tunnel from where we stood, down in the gut. A bright fire crackled across the blue of the sea at either end of the airy sun-strewn tunnel, with its floor of pale sand and still water. Hermit crabs scampered and lobster larvae zoomed around the clear shallows. We drank it all in, the clean salty air, the sun, the cool water on our feet, the refreshing simplicity of a weekend spent outdoors with kindred spirits. When it was time to go, we clambered back into the boats one last time, pulled the last four miles to the mainland, loaded our boats and gear onto trailers, and went on our final quest of the trip: to obtain giant cones of soft-serve.
Photo credits: Tracy Lessor, Dy Yates, Leigh Dorsey
