My teammate, Mike Boiduk, and I had made our own hoops by simply tying the ends of the rope together in a figure eight knot.Our 'wits' seemed to disgust the organizer of the Raleigh Historical Corporation's second annual wooden boat race. He maintained his pleasantly verbose diatribe against our incompetence as he instructed us in splicing our 'wits' together, then helped launch our borrowed 14 foot punt.
Mike and I needed practice - Last year we'd put in a pitiful performance. Despite having brought five extra toll pins (on top of the four which began the race lodged securely in the gunnels), we were down to one toll pin by the time we rounded the last buoy in the previous year's race. Three of the five boats had already reached the finish line. While our lone remaining competing team shared our problem, they worked together to get back to the wharf. Mike and I chose a different tack - we started yelling at each other. Mike jumped overboard during the argument and by the time we reached the wharf we felt like social pariah's - our argument having carried across the water to the large crowd gathered for that race.
With that firmly in mind, we wanted an hour's practice before this year's race. Within a minute of rowing, Mr. Smith's 'wits' had fallen apart.
Sabotage (since I'm writing the article, I can call it whatever I want. Though Mr. Smith probably has a more accurate memory of what happened).
Now, Mr. Smith and his teammate Alvin Elliott were pretty well a shoe in for the victory - being the reigning champions from the previous year and having grown up rowing.
So Mike I switched back to our own crude 'wits' and readied ourselves at the wharf with the three other boats.
Opposing us were teams composed of Anthony Elliott and Miles Blake, Tad Smith and Ted Smith, Noah Smith and Alvin Elliott.
The crowd gathered on the stage and we were off. Things went smoothly at first, Mike and I never banged paddles, executed a good point turn around the first buoy and set course for the second farther up the harbour.
The wind was blowing up a small chop, but it was nothing to the 15 year-old wooden punt made by former fisherman Ray Elliott for his retirement. Nonetheless we found we were falling steadily behind. Mike and I have chosen to attribute our slower pace to the Raleigh punt being a faster boat (some might argue it had more to do with our rowing).
The 14 foot and 16 foot grown timbered boats rowed by the other teams are built light - they dance high on the water and are fast. The Raleigh punt is like a corvette and is a tribute to nearly two centuries of boatbuilding fishermen in the community. Our boat was wide and deep and pretty well solid timbered with steamed hard wood laths - built to be strong and exceptionally seaworthy for a small boat. It also had a deep keel for sailing. So while Mike and Ray had been able to carry 800 pounds of shingles in her to Lock's Cove the day before without any trouble, she's a heavy boat to row fast.
"Desperate times call for desperate measures," Mike muttered to me.
"And we're desperate men," I replied between gasps for air.
So we pulled out plan B - as Tad and Ted Smith cut across our bow to round the last buoy, Mike and I gave a few hard hauls on the oars. We pulled a 'pit maneuver' we'd learned from Nascar Racing and watching highway patrol cars take out escaping convicts in highspeed chases aired on the television show 'Cops'. We rammed them gently on their starboard quarter, pushing their stern around and leaving them facing backwards as we rowed on (now in second place).
Yet despite our noble display of sportsmanlike conduct, Mike and I watched in horror as the two young men got their boat turned around, steadily gained on us, passed us and made it to the wharf.
"Could of rowed for another hour," Mike said when we arrived a proud third place.
"Or two," I added, keeled over for breath. "Endurance is where we would have taken it."
Back at the wharf it was all laughter, a fine feed of capelin, stew, molasses bread and fish and brewis in the cookhouse.
"Was a wonderful day," said Noah Smith. "Next year we'll try to get a bigger crowd and a few more boats. This could become a big thing."
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