Piscataquis race features continuity

DOVER-FOXCROFT – If you’re a casual canoe racing fan like me, you tend to think the Kenduskeag Stream 16.5-miler held a week ago Saturday is the be-all and end-all of the sport around these parts. See the Kenduskeag and then get serious about baseball. That was my spring routine.

“You should check out the Piscataquis River race,” my paddlin’ brother-in-law, Dick Kelley, told me during a post-Kenduskeag discussion this week. “It’s shorter and it doesn’t get the attention the Kenduskeag gets, but it’s a fun race both to paddle and to watch.”

So I checked it out. OK, partly out of guilt. Heck, I thought, was it fair to skip a race every year just because it comes a week after the trendy Kenduskeag?

I made the drive up Route 15 to Guilford Saturday for the start. I stood along the bank at several points along the twisty, 9-mile section of rippled river. I shivered in my rain slicker while snow flurries and drizzle played tag over the dark, boulder infested water as 125 craft dipped past. And I saw a more exciting finish than I’d ever seen in covering a dozen Kenduskeags.

I’m not talking about the overall winner of the 23rd annual splash through Maine’s heartland. Winterport kayaker Ken Cushman paddled like he had an outboard motor up each sleeve, he ran so far away with it, finishing in 50 minutes, 46 seconds to dust Fred Ludwig of Houlton by 1:54.

No, it was the Open Class, two-man short racing canoe competition that warmed me up.

What I discovered is the Piscataquis race gives a viewer willing to travel a sense of continuity the long, meandering Kenduskeag never could.

Unlike the Kenduskeag, all craft in each class in the Piscataquis start at the same time. Because the river is never more than 100 yards or so from the road, it is a simple matter to keep up with each class’s progress via the drive and park routine.

When the OC2-short tandem of Dick Johnson and Dan Thayer of Auburn paired off immediately after the start in a back-straining duel with Richard Heath of Gardiner and Bill Deighan of Newburg, I was there to see it.

When the two orange Mad River 16 1/2-footers were still neck and neck at the two-mile mark, I was there.

Ditto when the two craft slid under me as I stood on the pilings, breathing the wood-shed smell of Lows covered bridge at the 3 1/2-mile point.

And again at the old dam only two miles from the finish, there were the two orange canoes, but on opposite sides of the river, Johnson and Thayer leading by perhaps a boat-length.

After parking near the finish area across the road from Foxcroft Academy, I joined a crowd staring up river at the railroad trestle that crossed the water half a mile distant.

First Cushman appeared under the trestle, growing larger until he crossed the finish. Then Ludwig. Then kayaker Steve Moser. A few seconds later, the two OC2 canoes followed closely by a third canoe appeared.

As the two lead canoes grew closer, the cadence each tandem used to signal it was time to switch paddles to the other side of the craft grew louder. Johnson and Thayer still appeared to lead by perhaps half a canoe length over Heath and Deighan. But the latter were closing.

For the final 500 yards the four paddlers strained nearly in unison, leaning further and further forward as they dug deeper into the water and into themselves. The two canoes leaped in time to their strokes.

At the finish, it was too close to call from a distance. The timers on the bank conferred, then shouted that Deighan and Heath had won by perhaps the width of a paddle. The clock would put Deighan-Heath at 1:00:47 and Johnson-Thayer at 1:00:48. One second. It was closer than that.

“I couldn’t tell if we won or not,” Deighan, a 40-year-old oral surgeon with a salt-and-pepper beard, would gasp later. “I didn’t know if we could catch ’em.”

Heath, a 39-year-old geologist for the Maine Department of Environmental protection, smiled behind his spectacles. “It was a great race.”

Yes, it was.

Turns out Heath and Deighan had dueled Johnson and Thayer in the more famous Kenduskeag last week. Johnson and Thayer finished second in the class. Deaighan and Heath hit a ledge and dumped two miles from the finish, finishing well out of contention.

Both tandems, who have been paddling together for years, are competing in the Downriver Championship Series sponsored by the Maine Canoe & Kayak Racing Organization. The Piscataquis outcome sets up a rubber match in this Saturday’s Machias River race.

“I guess we’ll have to be there,” said Thayer.

So should anyone who thinks the Kenduskeag is the only canoe race around.