This is an entry about boats, and to some extent how to row them, but to a much larger extent this is an entry about how not to row those same boats.

The Lake Champlain Maritime Museum cares a great deal about boating on Lake Champlain, which makes life easy, because they would have a lot of explaining to do to their board of directors if they were to take an interest in say, train travel through Wyoming. And during the summer, the LCMM offers a community rowing program, where you, as a member of the community, pay $50 for a season of rowing about on Lake Champlain in gigantic boats that I thought were dragon boats, but were later proved to be otherwise. And to suck in said members of the community, the LCMM has taken a lesson from the drug dealer's business model: the first row's free.

So one Thursday last month, I made my way down to the marina, at the place where all the cars line up to take the ferry across to New York state, to do some rowing. I was pretty excited because hey, boats! On water! HuhZAH! Also, unlike some other people who showed up, I was under no illusion that the LCMM staff would be doing the rowing.

I was a little early, so I wandered around the LCMM shipyard and tried to figure out where exactly on the marina I was supposed to meet all the other rowers. The marina is fairly hectic, what with the ferry and the out-of-service ferries and the shipyard and the gas station and cafe and live band and gift shop (do you know that Vermont makes maple things? We do, and if you visit us, it's a state law that we pelt you with them. Hold still.) To make a long story short, two different LCMM staffers gave me two different sets of directions, both of which subsequently turned out to be wrong. But I wound up near where I was supposed to be and, more to the point, I wound up hanging out with two relaxed and groovy ladies who were also there to row, and also in the wrong place. Chance favors the confused.

The boats for rowing are, I believe, technically called "skips" or "sweeps". Less technically, they are the type of boats you see in pirate movies whenever someone needs to be rowed out to the main pirate ship. Only there was no pirate ship in evidence (sadness) and the ferry captain said they had a schedule to keep but hey, maybe another day. The other difference is that each rower has one oar. One big oar. One 12-footlong oar. One of the commands for the rowing is to "toss" said oars. When your coxswain yells "Toss your oars", you're supposed to hoist your 12-footlong oar up on its end, so that the bit that doesn't go in the water is resting between your feet, and the blade of the oar is 12 feet above your head. I imagined that from the ferry, our sweep must have looked, at that point, not unlike an expired daddy long-legs. Although not to scale, of course.

That first time I went, it was an all-female crew: 3 of us ladies over 30 (none of whom had rowed before), and 3 high-schoolers who had been rowing all spring on the community college rowing team. It wasn't the difference in experience levels, so much as the difference in energy. One half of the boat kept wanting to row at Warp Hormone, and the other half wished they'd stop. And in fact one woman did ask to stop early and be let off at the International Sailing Center and there's nothing wrong with that, haters. I thought it was awesome that she had the gumption to say "Wow I'm done and I think my arms just fell overboard." More power to her.

A note about rowing technique. Rowing with one big oar (I have no idea if it's the same, or as dramatic, with two) involves making a long horizontal "o" with your oar. Your oar goes into the water and along one long side of the o, and then out of the water, up along the curve of the o and back down the other long side of the o, to curve into the water and start again. Okay? A horizontal oblong motion. It is possible, however, to "crab" your oar (technical term). That's when, as you bring your oar up along the curve to go back and reset, you don't get the blade all the way out of the water. At that point physics takes over and, as rowing is essentially activity with a lever, physics crawls up the lever, across the fulcrum, and knocks the rower over backwards. Sometimes it knocks the rower backwards over other rowers. 5 times.

Other than that, I had a blast shooting across Lake Champlain. There had been the threat of thunderstorms earlier in the day, and as we started out, there was still a bank of ominous grey clouds hanging over the lake. And yet, the farther from shore we got, the more the clouds dissipated, until we were able to finish our journey under pleasantly hazy sunshine.

So now I am a weekly rower. It's amazing to be out on the lake under your own power, able to look across not just the Burlington waterfront, but also the whole town as it sprawls up the hill. Different coxswains have taken us to various locations. The last time I went, a couple weeks ago, we rowed up to North Beach, where a section of sheer cliff juts out and creates small shoals, and we sat for awhile watching the sun set. The day was so clear that we could see all the way across the lake, 10 miles to the Adirondacks. As we sat and recouped from the row out, the mountains turned shades of blue and violet in the twilight, and the sky seemed to get bigger as it darkened. We sat out there for awhile, longer than strictly necessary for recuperating, listening to the steady lap of the waves against the wooden sides of the boat, and dangling our fingers in the water. No one spoke.

Of course, rowing in an open lake has its challenges and jetskiers I am talking to your crazed, insensitive asses. A four-seat wooden sweep is highly suggestible in terms of wakes left by jet skiers. It's easy to get out of the way of yachts and ferries, which are a) large and b) relatively slow. Jet-skiers, however, tend to reserve their special places in hell by coming out of nowhere at top speed and yes, it's heelarious to buzz the wooden boat with all the oars hanging out. You. Suck.

On the way back from the trip to North Beach, we took another rest from rowing, out past the breakwater, closer to the marina, and while we were parked, contemplating the blue Adirondacks, the ache in our backs and the truly stunning cover of "Funky Cold Medina" happening down at the waterfront cafe, this wooden motorboat came squealing up to us. And when I say, "squealing up to us", I mean that it was filled with teenagers, some female, all of whom were making a high-pitched noise that carried well over water. And as we sat and watched, this motorboat started doing tighter and tighter circles in the water, necessitating tipping to one side or the other, and of course, more squealing, until the circle came that was a little too tight, and the boat hung on one side, prop out of the water, suspended between lake and sky. I firmly believe that it was the rise in pitch and frequency of those squeals that got them down safely on the right side. And as they sped off towards the marina with no appreciable lowering in volume, someone in our boat said, "Thank god I'm 30."