A Sunday special post

photo by luismi1985

Coming back from a race yesterday, I got worried—really worried.

It wasn’t about the team or the race results.

Instead it was about something haunting. The future. Specifically, money for the future.

During the regatta, as I watched one of our races go by I struck up a conversation with a parent of one of my rowers. The theme of the conversation was how bleak the economy looks right now, and how discretionary money in people’s budgets are drying up.

We both wondered what tomorrow would bring.

Why is no one talking about this at our level? Continue Reading »

A reader recently asked:

Hello Mike,
I found your site while looking for information on transporting a rowing shell across the country. My son is a college varsity rower and has purchased a shell (for sculling).

Do you know how folks get their boats back and forth across the country?

He was able to hitch a ride for the boat with a team that was traveling from the east to the west at the end of May. But, to get the boat back to the east for the school year, it seems there is not as much travel in August. Do you know of any shipping companies or better yet, some type of fellowship of rowers who move boats back and forth and often have a spare spot on a trailer?

Seems my son cannot be the only person with this problem?

Any suggestions?

My response:

I think that you really have two choices: (a) a company that is transporting shells, or (b) a team that is doing the same.

Most teams won’t be moving boats until either later Fall or the Spring time, so that might not help.

Per the former, a company. Several shell companies deliver boats coast-to-coast, and some might have orders in early Fall. I would suggest either Pocock or Vespoli, USA. There are others, but these two are very busy, so you might have a better chance of getting a ride.

There are also some boat repair companies that do the same. I might suggest Klinger Engineering. All will charge a decent amount, but you would be hiring capable transport.

You might also try USRowing. They might have some suggestions.

And how about you? Any helpful insights about cross-country transport?

Several years ago I wrote an article about how to strap your boat, for Row2k.com. At that time there was a serious discussion about strapping, accidents, and how to prevent them. I stuck my neck out and offered my opinion.

Not everyone liked what I had to say.

As most coaches/rowers/Riggers I try to learn as time goes by, and when I am wrong I will be the first to admit it . . . however, in this case I think that time has shown that my suggestions on strapping a boat are catching on, and hopefully helping.

You can read the entirety of that article, and I stand by the concepts there. However, I want to emphasize a particular method of strapping a boat—that of double-strapping—that I feel I didn’t emphasize strongly enough. Continue Reading »

I just received this question, from Beth, about the best way to strap a boat. I would like to use it as a discussion starter:

Hi Mike! I am with a H.S. team and I’m hoping you can help settle an argument about the best way to strap down a boat when we’re loading up the trailer. We have one coach who says we should loop the straps around the inside brace when we’re strapping down the outside boats. He thinks this will prevent them from coming loose. The other coaches disagree because it puts the straps at an awkward angle. Do you have an opinion?
Thanks!

So that’s Beth’s question. (Look at the straps on the photo above to get an idea of the position of the straps.)

So what do YOU think? Do you have an opinion, answer, suggestion, story or idea to share? If so, leave it in comments below. I plan on posting a video about how I suggest you strap next week.

Too often the straps we use to secure our rowing shells get abused to the point of revolt. The revolt can range from something small— such as getting all knotted, to something catastrophic—such as fraying or breaking at the worst possible moment.

Straps need TLA—tender loving attention. They don’t need a lot of it, but you have to give them some. If not, you WILL have a revolt. Guaranteed.

The video shows one simple thing you can do to prove to your strap that you love it, and help it be there for you when you need it. I call it the Page Roll. Rob Page was a coxswain of note for our team several years ago and he showed me this simple way to store our straps while at the same time checking them for problems (such as fraying) that could indicate the strap might fail at when you needed it most. (The audio may not work, so I’ve included notes below).

It is a fairly simple process:

Step 1: Unfurl the strap, and look it over for any frayed edges. If you see any the strap needs to be replaced, and DON’T use it. Let me be clear about that. It is a BAD (UNSAFE) strap. Get rid of it (for example . . . give it to an athlete for a belt).

Step 2: Take the end and slide it through the large opening of the cam. This is NOT the opening that the strap goes through to be tightened. Pull strap through about eight inches.

Step 3: Begin rolling the strap from the fold in in that is away from the cam buckle. Gentle, and tightly, roll it until you reach the cam.

Step 4: While holding the cam buckle against the roll, take the end that you put through the cam in step 2 and wrap it around the roll. Then put the end through the slot in the buckle. Gently tighten it up.

The strap will now stay neatly in a roll, ready for action when you are. A great benefit to this method is ease of storing. You can get numerous rolled straps in a small space.

Take a look at the back of this truck. What do you notice? (Or more specifically, what don’t you notice?)

This is exactly what I saw the other day when I came out of my hotel room during our recent Spring Training trip. I went to connect the shell trailer to the truck—no hitch. Some time during the night some person decided that he (or she) needed our trailer hitch more than I did.

Hitches are one of those items—like car insurance—that you don’t greatly appreciate until you really need it. And then when you need it to be ready to go, and it is not—whammo. Continue Reading »

We are all suffering pain at the pump right now. However rowing coaches can suffer a level of pain that most other drivers do not have to endure. This picture above should give you some indication of what I mean.

More boats and rowing equipment are damaged in transit than while in actual use. Although I haven’t seen statistics to back me up on this, I would venture a guess that a significant about of that damage happens while fueling on trips. I have had several coach-friends tell me “bummer” stories about gas station crashes. Continue Reading »

Boy do we ever travel a lot in the sport of rowing. Regattas, erg races, recruiting trips, conventions and meetings. Sometimes it seems like we spend more time on the road than at home—especially during racing season. Planning ahead can greatly reduce the hassles, problems and risks of traveling. Here are six steps to success:

STEP 1: ONE-YEAR TO THREE-MONTHS AHEAD

Get information. Rowing events tend to be seasonal with notable differences in the events with each season: head races in fall, erg races in winter, sprint races in the spring. Work ahead at least one whole season to get information on upcoming events. This may seem like planning too far ahead but it’s not; in fact some athletic programs work two to three years ahead.
Pick the event. With information in hand, now is the time to select where you want to go and what you want to do. Decide what event is right for you or for your program. Call the organizers with any questions.

Budget your expenses. Now the big question is, “Can you afford to go?” Get all the cost information about the event: transportation, registration, housing, etc. Then look at your budget and figure out if you can swing the trip. Continue Reading »

(This post is a reprint of an article I wrote for USRowing magazine, published originally in 1993)

I damaged a rowing shell the other day. Well…damaged isn’t quite the right word—OBLITERATED is a little more appropriate.

This destruction was due to an unplanned gymnastics move the shell, which I now call The Late Shell, decided to perform off of our shell trailer. Unfortunately, at the time, the trailer was doing 55 miles per hour on the back roads of Delaware. I can honestly say that this accident was one of the most unexpected and unpleasant experiences we, both the shell and I, have shared in quite a while.

To the best of my knowledge this is not something that happens very often. My insurance adjuster has convinced me of that. It took half-an-hour to persuade him that “No, I wasn’t calling because I had damaged one of my bookshelves” and, “Yes, as wild as it may sound those big pointy boats do actually get put on trailers and moved around from place to place.” But trailering accidents do happen more often than you might think. According to an insurance friend trailering accidents account for at least thirty percent of all damage done to rowing shells.

So this is what happened on that fateful day in Delaware. Driving along I heard a loud noise from behind. Looking back in my mirror I saw the shell lying on the pavement directly in the middle-of-the-road. Cars were swerving every-which-way; not so much to miss the shell but to dodge the flock of personal-injury attorneys who had stopped and were digging for their cards. (Actually some never did stop, they just folded their cards into airplanes and flew them at me.)

So I pulled over. A rowing shell is certainly not the type of thing you leave lying in the middle-of-the road. I’ve seen people drop bags, suitcases and other assorted stuff off of their vehicles, including a three-foot cactus—and keep on driving—probably unaware of what they just lost. But a shell, now that’s different. If you ever drop a shell off a trailer you’ll certainly know it happened.

Well, almost always…apparently several years ago a rowing trailer was returning from a race in Germany, speedily making its way to the coast of France to catch a ferry across the English Channel. When they reached their port the drivers got out and saw they were missing something. Seems that a certain one of those bright-yellow shells fell off their trailer somewhere along their trip, and they were none the wiser. So they made the old “U-turn” and scoured the countryside looking for their boat. After several days of what must have been agonizing driving they located the shell in a farmer’s field. That was the good news. The bad news was the farmer had gutted the boat, filled it full of grain, and was using it to feed his hogs. He said he thought it was some part of a missile that had dropped from the sky and that he might as well put it to good use.

Now this brings up a major hazard of driving a shell trailer on the highways—some drivers just don’t have any idea what you’re moving. Like the fellow who wandered up to me in a gas station in Georgia as I was filling up the truck. He said, “My wife and I are having a little argument. I say that those things on your trailer are helicopter blades. She says I’m nuts. She says they are some sort of garden sculpture. We bet dinner on it—what do you say?” Drivers like these often get distracted looking at the boats and tend not to maintain a safe distance. Of course there are the other extreme of drivers who think you’re transporting some top-secret, destructo-weapon and go to dangerous lengths to avoid you.

Well, back to Delaware. While I was standing smack-dab in the middle of the road (staring at what used to be a happy rowing shell) one of the attorneys flings me his card. “Well, couldn’t get much worse, could it? But if by chance it does get worse give me a call,” he says as he heads to his car to go hunt for bigger game.

It wasn’t until later that I had a chance to think about his comment. Boy, was he wrong—it certainly could have been much worse. Forty-five feet of shell, launched from a trailer at 55 m.p.h. is a force to contend with. Minutes before I was driving on I-95, which in Delaware is about as busy as an ice-cream truck on a one-hundred-degree summer day. If The Late Shell had flown off then it could have been a major catastrophe. Yeah, I was very fortunately there were no injuries, except of course for my bruised ego.

What caused The Late Shell to go flying off of our trailer is still a mystery. The trailer was brand new and so were the straps (tie-downs)—and they were checked and double-checked. The only thing I did not do, and which I usually do, is to stop about twenty miles into the drive and recheck the straps. On long trips I also stop every 100 miles to recheck everything. It makes for a longer drive but then there is usually someone at the rest stop who is happy to wander up and ask, “Hey, what’s on that trailer—a carnival ride?”

The best I can figure is the shell was most likely tied too close to the edge of the rack and the straps were not tight enough. Ahhh—human error—the prime cause of trailering accidents. The road was very bumpy and during the drive there was a horrendously-stiff cross breeze pushing against the shell. All these things probably combined to shove the shell off the trailer.

And the aftermath? Well, we’ve made a couple improvements to the trailer. We now put an extra strap over the front end of all boats which goes around the vertical supports of the rack as well as under the rack itself. Oh…we also got a nice check from the insurance company to replace our bookshelf.

I had almost forgotten about this whole episode until last week when I got a phone call. “Hey, are you that trailer driver? The same driver who destroyed a shell on the highway? You may not remember me but I was one of the sympathetic and helpful bystanders at the accident. Yes…that’s right…one of the guys who gave you a card. Yes…the attorney. Hey, did it turn out anyone was hurt? No, gee that’s too bad…but what about you, you sound rather tired…you know it could be Post-Traumatic-Shell-Destruction Syndrome. Nasty stuff. You may need an attorney…wait…don’t hang u…CLICK…”