As a broke student, I rely a lot on the kindness of strangers. I couldn't have chosen a better sport for it [ed: could I?]—the rowing community rocks. Anyway, in my continuing efforts to cox my way around the world, I decided to take advantage of the whole summer off thing and do a rowing trip: three weeks, three cities, loads and loads of water time.

My first stop was Holly Metcalf's Row as One camp in South Hadley, MA. Holly is an Olympian (1984 gold medallist); she started G-Row Boston, a program that teaches girls how to row, and WeCanRow (Women Enduring CANcer) which usually has a boat at Head of the Charles, coxswain, bow, stroke and everyone in between, all cancer survivors. She also does these masters camps for women, so that rowers who started late in life have a supportive learning environment. I met Holly last year when I did the first ever West coast Row as One camp in Oregon. Fun stuff, so this year I went east.

I got to Boston at 5:40am, where I was picked up by an AMAZING lady named Ellen, who would also be giving me a ride to camp. We got there at 3pm and I met the two other coxswains, Sarah and Melissa. Both in high school, it created some interesting compliance issues; all you HS coxswains are probably aware that college coaches aren't allowed to have contact with you before junior year, and as a result we lost all but one of the college coaches who usually coach the camp. There were only two eights, so the three of us switched everyday between coxing one or the other and shooting video [On shooting video by the way: if you find yourself doing it, get at least five strokes per rower and five strokes per pair. Zoom in and out gradually, and try to get the rower and their blade in the same frame, so that form can be correlated with blade work. The occasional candid shot—launching, landing, flipping...coach screaming at the novvies to "WEIGH ENOUGH! WEIGH ENOUGH! WEIGH ENOUGH!"—is also nice for the end of year slideshowJ]. In addition, I was co-opted into driving the van to and from practice everyday, which was a bit of a challenge because it was an automatic and I usually drive a stick...I ended up taking off my left shoe to remind myself not to use my left foot, and that worked out pretty well [ed: except on two embarrassing and undocumented occasions...].

My first outing on the Connecticut river: the skeg broke off. Now there are two lessons here. The first is that you want to watch out for the skeg when you're launching from a dock (in fact, you want to watch out for the skeg whenever you launch, but all the San Diego boat clubs do beach launches/landings, so dock perils were a little new). The second is that you need to have faith in your abilities. The skeg didn't fall off right away, even though we'd heard a scrape as the boat came down. I don't get out on rivers much (we row on a bay, the conditions that we have to deal with are a little different), so my first reaction when I started writing my name on the river was ‘Oh, crap' and general embarrassment at the suckiness of my performance ( the thing is, although steering is the bane of my existence, I know I'm a better steersman than that, but that whole outing, it never occurred to me to reach under and check to see if the fin was gone. Silly.). Two words when we got back to the dock: insane relief. We attached a new fin, and the second outing later that morning went like a dream.

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