Jan. 15:

The ICW from Dania to Miami Beach was straight and fairly quiet. We had left John U. Lloyd State Park whose employees proved to be as unhelpful as the ones we had met last year in other Florida State Parks. I think being a state employee seems to give some people the idea that there is no need to try to please visitors. If it were a private business whose profits depended on visitors there would be an incentive to please. The cigar smoking, abdominally well endowed attendant at the canoe launch and refreshment center, who could not give us permission to carry our boat 50 feet to the little beach on Whiskey Creek, said we would have to get any special permission such as that from the park manager. All he could do was get us a hot dog or burger. The thought of his cooking anything that I ate was intolerable.

We gave up the idea of launching from that beach quickly and launched from the boat ramp that was hard, slippery and steep. A fellow was trying to pull his boat and trailer out of the water with his pick up truck and trailer. His wheels spun on the slippery ramp and it looked like he would go nowhere but back in the water. The thought of the truck rolling back into the water for a second appealed to me. After all he was pulling a stinkpot. That is what I have been brought up calling motorboats. But we hopped in the back of the truck for him and our weight improved the traction enough for him to drive out. We launched off the ramp and rowed by the canoe beach and along Whiskey Creek until we reached a marina and a connection back to the ICW. Whiskey Creek was shallow and lined with mangroves. Several times I had to disengage my oars from the snarl of mangrove roots.

The sight of the large ships in Ft. Lauderdale receded in the distance and soon was replaced by high-rise condo buildings. Hundreds of these buildings line the barrier island east of the ICW and more are rising inland. A building boom was underway. I wonder what the developers are claiming for views. It seems that the condos with an ocean view like the hotel rooms are worth a premium price. It will soon be necessary to be on the 50^th floor to see the ocean. I wonder if the blind should not be offered special rates. When you are rowing continuously for long periods of time your mind wonders all sorts of things! I wondered if there were really enough people able to afford to pay the rents that each of these condos must command. If so, where were they? I might have been able to count 5 or 6 people sitting beside all of the pools lining those shores.

Habitat is building small affordable houses for low-income people at a rate slower than the increase in numbers of such people. The developers are building high-end condos at a rate higher than the increase in numbers of high-income people. I see something very wrong with this picture.

Real Estate thoughts dimmed as I pulled us across a windy stretch of water between to points and into the Indian Creek. The word creek seems to mean many different things. This was a waterway 300 feet wide crossed by numerous bridges and lined by piers and walls holding back the money that must have been dumped into building the showplaces on its shores. Indian Creek, I remembered, had been the location of the University of Miami’s boat house where some nice fellows let us leave our boat last year to be later picked up by the boat carrier that transported it back to New Hampshire. I had expectations that they may be glad to have someone stop there after rowing over 200 miles down the coast. Well, we finally rowed up to the float of the boat house where many students from a variety of schools were preparing to launch their eights and fours and there was no space on the dock for us to pull in. I stood by waiting for an opening and finally was able to pull up to the end of the dock where I tied the bowline and let Heather out. We walked up to the boathouse to find someone with some authority. It was difficult. Finally after opening the door to the office I met a lady with a British accent that could not understand what I was asking for and simply said that they were too busy to be bothered. I had asked if we could take the boat out there and carry it across their parking lot until I got back with the car to take it away. In spite of the obvious crowding of rowers and shells this could have been done without intrusion. I also spoke to a young man she introduced as the "head coach". He neither understood what I was asking and I concluded they simply did not want us to exist. When asked for suggestions of where we might be able to take out neither offered any. I tried to remember the days when I was a crew coach. If a rower were to have rowed in from afar I believe I would have done all that I could to help meet their needs because there was an unspoken bond among the fraternity of crew people in those days. Perhaps the rapid growth of the sport has seen that bond deteriorate. What a loss.

Having rowed 20 miles already, we begrudgingly got back in our boat after I politely helped a middle aged man push off the dock in a single scull. Accomplished scullers do this by themselves before sitting down. I pulled away with as much power as I have let loose on my oars since the last Head of the Charles I entered. Actually it was probably considerably more. I was watching three Princeton women’s crews who had launched shortly after we left. They were gradually coming up on me from behind and the instinct to hold them off as long as possible took over. I matched strokes with them and drove my legs down as if this were a serious race. I thanked the reception we’d been given at the boathouse for the adrenaline that drove me. They finally caught up with me when there was a loud bang and I felt myself come off the seat as I tried to hold water to slow down. The bow had run into a piling post and glanced toward the starboard side and shortly the post hit the port rigger bending its diagonal strut. Fortunately nothing was broken. The bow ball we had fashioned out of a foam ball from the drugstore at home had done its job. We had reached the end of Indian Creek where we entered the Collins canal and the eights were forced to stop a few lengths past our demise. Their coach’s launch also stopped just after leaving a wake that compounded our difficulty. I felt a certain level of triumph in this competition in spite of the blow to our boat and the pride we have taken to keep it like new.

Sculling boats of any kind are somewhat sacred to me. I was in awe of the wooden boats I rowed at St. Paul’s School in the 1950s. They were built like Stradivarius violins by a master craftsmen named George Pocock in Seattle, Washington. In those days Pocock was the only one who made competitive shells in the U.S. and, of course, he could only make a limited number. Rare were schools or colleges that could afford them and crew as a sport was limited to those fortunate few who attended these institutions. I have always remembered the days when I used to spend time in the boathouse watching and occasionally helping Ned Herron who was an older man hired full time by St. Paul’s School to maintain its large collection of wooden shells. His ability to mend a hole in the thin veneer of these boats caused by hitting a hazard of some kind was uncanny. One could not see the patch. Today carbon fiber boats have replaced wooden boats and many competing companies now make them. They are much more durable and somewhat lighter but, in my opinion, not significantly faster than the veneer boats. Hull design has been approaching the limits of perfection for longer than any other item of sporting equipment. Advances in speed have therefore become smaller and smaller. Yes, I was privileged to have rowed in Pocock’s boats and they will always be my standard of excellence.

The Collins canal was a narrow and long, almost concealed connection to the Miami harbor. Heather had seen a boat ramp at a park located at its other end and it was shown on the chart as having two feet of water. Half way through, still pulling with the adrenaline of my previous experience, I commented to her that this was the kind of place one might see floating bodies dumped by mafia types. She paled. We practically bushwhacked through the rest of this open sewer until coming out into the current of the outgoing tide. A few strokes upstream and through a bridge brought us to a boat ramp where we pulled out as the sun was setting - 24 miles after starting out in Whiskey Creek in Dania.

Walter Camacho who is an ex-student of Gene Minor, an architect I have met from Portland, OR, had agreed to meet us at the Miami Boat House. We had contacted him by cell phone to tell him we would have to move our take-out pick up location to Island View Park four miles away. Already late, I felt extremely apologetic. I would not have held it against him if he had decided that these strangers had stretched his patience too far and said to me that he just couldn’t wait and beat around Miami Beach any longer. But Walter was not that way. He found the park and waited while we took the boat out and then took me to Dania. It was then I realized how far we had really come because by road it had to have been 40 miles. Our water route has always been much shorter than by road. Walter was all that Gene Minor had said he would be. It was a delight to have encountered this kind young fellow and we hope that we may meet him again. He even led me back to the park after leaving Dania so that I would find it.

We found the nearest motel, ordered in pizza at 10:00 p.m. and anticipated the row through Miami harbor.