In article <529ndl$...@dfw-ixnews5.ix.netcom.com>,
Gregory W Benning <gbenn...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>Give it a few weeks, when its even darker at 6am & all the club crews
>are out there. All kidding aside, it can get very dangerous betweeen
>the darkness & congestion. A few years ago a sculler was killed in a
>collision. My advice would be row upstream of the the race course, or
>get past the starting line 'before' 6am.... That's when the flotilla
>launches from BU.
The accident I think you are referring to happened in very different
conditions. Sometime around 1989/90, a sculler was heading upstream by
Weld boathouse at about 8 a.m. on a Saturday morning (I'm pretty sure it
was a weekend, because Radcliffe doesn't usually practice so late on
weekdays and there were a few Radcliffe crews preparing to go out on the
water at the time). A coach (I won't identify him here - no charges were
pressed as far as I am aware) was following his college crews downstream
in his catameran-style launch. He crossed the river to talk to someone
standing on the Weld dock, so was heading downstream down the wrong side
of the river. Due to the glare of the sun and to the fact that he was not
looking in front of him, he did not see the sculler, and the sculler did
not see him. The front of his catameran launch did not have bowballs
fitted onto it and was actually rather sharp and pointy. The sculler got
impaled in a bad way, and died within two days.
One of the results of all of this was that all the clubs and colleges on
the river sat down and redesigned the traffic pattern for the entire
rowable part of the Charles River, and a lot of emphasis has since been
placed on teaching this to new coxes and coaches. Also, coaches' launches
with pointy bows had their bows cut down and/or had bowballs fitted.
All I can say is make sure you know the traffic pattern and hope that
other crews and coaches do too. If you are overtaking around the Eliot
bend, be careful - but the river is indeed wide enough to do it. I agree
with you that crews shouldn't really stop there to get coached, but it is
not surprising that many novice crews which boat from boathouses around
there will be moving slowly. It is not really wise to take novice crews
which launch from Weld or further upstream of Weld below Weeks footbridge,
because it is far better to have slow-moving crews on the relatively wide
(if difficult) Eliot bend than on the Powerhouse stretch, which is
narrower and harder to pass on. For happier sculling in calm weather, the
basin is always good (unless those damned unpredictable sailboats are
out).
Charles Ehrlich
<ehrl...@widomaker.com>
http://www.widomaker.com/~ehrlich
