OT: Head of the Fish Regatta

[Tom]

Wow! 50 degrees, pouring down rain since about midnight last night, what looked like hundreds of high school and college and other boats - the field was about 8 inches of mud everywhere, wind kicking up, kids rowing like maniacs, 4,000 hypothermic people soaked to the skin shivering and clustering up against the exhausts of the buses idling because that's the only warmth around...

and kids rowing two miles in singlets and shorts. My nephew (intelligently dressed in three layers) said it wasn't at all bad rowing but waiting ten or fifteen minutes to take out was a little tough. I can imagine the kids sitting there with no clothes on must have been really suffering.

I'm not quite sure of the circumstance, but I did see a two-woman boat just blow by a series of the men's novice 8s. That had to hurt.

[Velociotis]

I was helping with the timing. The winds picked up as predicted and by the time the last mixed 8+ went by there were six of us holding down the tent. It was all headwind too. Not a fun row. They had to cancel the masters races for tommorrow.

[merckx]

from the fish. Chris has to limit entries, or it is my last time. No results, mud up to the ears, boats allowed to start out of order, mayhem at the docks. Very unsafe despite the weather. Chaos.

[Velociotis]

I was a bit suprised the USRA officials ran the last event.

[merckx]

Hey,

thanks for rolling up your sleeves and helping out. I appreciate all of the hard work that the regatta folks put into the event. The regatta, however, just needs a handle to grab.

[Tom]

From what I saw, the take out dock situation got out of control a couple of times. It also stacked up badly off the water, and I think some of it had to do with us spectators wandering around and getting in the way. They have to control that really tightly. Stick a couple intelligent park police over there and people would pay attention better than to an official in a raincoat that looks just like the rest of us.

How much had to do with the conditions? A couple of inches of rain after getting a couple of inches of rain in the last week or so will turn a low area into a swamp and then you turn a couple of thousand people loose in there you're going to have mud.

I have to figure that the communication out on the water had to be hurt because between the wind and the rain you couldn't shout back and forth too well. I'm guessing.

I suppose once the whole thing is set in motion, they felt they couldn't have all those teams heading in and then say "Never mind!" so they went with it.

I think they're suffering from their success. The sport's getting so big... in the morning I cross the Aqueduct bridge at 6am or so and there's always three or four boats on the water. There are at least two new boat houses on the river that I can think of upstream from that. Schenectady High has a team, I think - a city school district, not some affluent town like you might think. How do you limit entries? They probably have to because there's only so much carrying capacity in the place they're running it.

I think that if it had been 65 degrees and bluebird, the problems wouldn't have been so obvious.