By PAT CALL
For The Beachcomber
The opening event on the calendar for each spring crew season is the masters-juniors scrimmage, and Saturday’s beautiful conditions were ideal for some spirited rowing.
After four flights of races over a 1,500-meter course, it all came down to the finale: a head-to-head mixed (four men and four women) eight race. At the awards ceremony for the coveted One Guinea Pig cup, masters stroke Bruce Morser observed that he used to think that the annual race was between the masters and the juniors but now knows it is between the masters and the Fountain of Youth, as once again, with an annually widening age disparity, the juniors prevailed decisively.
This year’s course featured new buoys from the start near Portage to the finish line at Jensen Point. These larger orange and yellow buoys can easily be seen even by the masters with their diminishing eyesight and stiffening necks and are part of an overall safety emphasis that has been the focus of the club in recent years (rowers are now wearing high visibility caps and windbreakers as well).
On Sunday the junior crew journeyed to Lake Sammamish for a three-way scrimmage with the larger Sammamish and Olympia Area Rowing programs. Again racing conditions were ideal until a fog bank blew onto the course, sending rowers back to the shore and delaying racing by 90 minutes.
Vashon rowers entered 27 varsity, JV and novice events, winning 12 of them. A number of rowers raced in their first 2,000-meter event: Mabel Moses, Kate Lande, Maya Gould, Emma Greenlee, Cooper Py, Seth Rosen, Connor van Egmond, Cole Puckett, Lelah Assink, Tor Ormseth, Andreas Lorentzen, Aryeh Stahl, Joey Papa, Rohin Petram and Aidan Teachout.
Eighth grader Lelah Assink had this to say about her first race: “Two weeks ago I had never rowed a stroke in my life. Rowing out to the starting line, I was really nervous. The rowers in the other boats looked so big and so much older. But once the race started it was just like the races we had done in practice, and it all went really well.”
Summing up the weekend’s events, Coach Richard Parr observed that with the growing age gap between masters and juniors, next year’s scrimmage will include an age handicap for the first time. As an example, the US Rowing official handicap for eights would give the masters a 21-second advantage if the average age of the rowers was 60. Of the junior scrimmage in Sammamish, he noted that Vashon’s recent successes have attracted the attention of local coaches, leading to improved competition, so the crew will need to work extra hard to maintain its leadership position.
“Our varsity boats continue to perform well, and it is exciting to see a new group of novice rowers jumping into boats and also competing well,” he said.
— Pat Call is the father of a junior rower.
