The Connecticut River saw some great action this past week as the Ledyard Canoe Club hosted the United States Canoe Association Marathon Canoe & Kayak National Championships. Racers of all age groups, from six to 83, took part in the Championships that visited Hanover for the first time since 1988.
The race brought dozens of canoers and kayakers to the Hanover area as the big event of a busy summer season for the Ledyard Canoe Club. The club held the annual Ledyard Classic recently, as well as the annual Mascoma Slalom in April.
There were several different events at the Championships. There were sprint events, the orienteering event and the marathon races over the weekend. The marathon races were the most grueling, involving a 12-mile roundtrip circuit on the Connecticut and Ompompanoosuc rivers.
Though the Championships was composed mainly of the national participants from Canada and the northeastern United States, as well as entrants from Florida, North Carolina, California and Montana, Dartmouth itself was represented on the water by Ben Zabar '04.
Zabar has spent much of his water career as a white-water kayaker, only taking up flat-water canoeing this spring. He seems to have learned very quickly.
His first competition was the C-1 Men's race. The classification signifies a single-man canoe whose occupant is between the ages of 18 and 39. The race was a 500-meter dead sprint up the river.
Zabar finished eighth in his heat, one of two, but only the top 12 times advanced to the final race on Saturday. Zabar's time of 2:50:38 placed him seventeenth overall for the race, not quite good enough to qualify for the final.
The Big Green racer wasn't surprised by the stiff competition. "I was really intimidated the first day. All the guys out there were racing really fast and I was just trying to get a good time for myself," Zabar said.
After the intimidation had worn off, Zabar went on to compete in the men's C-1 orienteering event on Wednesday. Once again Zabar was alone in his canoe, this time against 21 other teams in different divisions.
Orienteering was also relatively new to Zabar, but no one would have been able to tell as he won the event.
Orienteering is a sort of scavenger hunt on the water where there are nine checkpoints placed around the river course. Some of these checkpoints are "dry," meaning that racers have to beach their canoes and run on land to reach the checkpoint, while others are "wet" and can be reached directly on the river. At each checkpoint, racers have to "punch" a scorecard with the pattern at the checkpoint in order to verify that they had visited every point.
The event totals about five miles of paddling in total, and requires a good deal of strategy, as navigation must be done via map. The teams are also started two minutes apart, thus requiring good map skills in lieu of following another team's lead.
The single-man canoe is more difficult than the two-man according to Zabar. "When there are two guys in the same canoe, one can get out and run along and trail and maybe pick up two checkpoints, or they can use strategies like that. You can't do that in a one-man canoe."
The victory did not come without difficulties, as Zabar began the race last of all the teams. "Because I started last, I never really knew where I was against the other teams," he said.
Zabar also suffered a small misfortune near the end of the race that cost him time. "Everyone is supposed to have two waterproof bags with them for the map and the punch card. I only brought one with me, so I had them in the same bag.
"So every time I needed the card, I had to open the bag with the map. My map actually fell apart on me. I had to find the last two checkpoints basically from memory. It cost me a few minutes of going around in circles almost."
Dartmouth students could also be seen staffing the Ledyard boat house and at other posts during the week, as many students volunteered to help out with the race. The volunteers came from the Ledyard Canoe Club blitz list. As a result, some of the volunteers were participating in their first event with the Club.
The volunteers made up a sizable portion of the events workers. "Volunteers seemed to be about half of the people working at the race," said Allison Forbes '04, one of the volunteers and a club member. Forbes also writes for The Dartmouth.
Dartmouth also made vocal appearances at the proceedings. Catherine Buck '04 and Lisa Schmidt '04, both members of the Subtleties, and the Summerphonics sang the National Anthem over the weekend to kick off the races.
The race represents an attempt for the Ledyard Club to diversify and get back to more flat-water events according to Forbes and Zabar. "Recently, the club has been predominantly white-water canoeing. But now we have the sea kayaking program , and we've been trying to organize more flat-water trips," said Zabar.
Ledyard was once a major part of flat-water racing in the United States, as club members comprised half of the 1972 Olympic Team and the Club coach was also the Olympic team's coach. Zabar, for one, is hoping that Nationals will keep bringing flat-water events back to Hanover.
"I'd be really excited about doing some more orienteering if we held an event here," he said.
Look for Ledyard Canoe Club and Ben Zabar to continue making waves in the future be it in white-water racing or in flat-water.
