WABI negotiates `rough water’ during Kenduskeag Stream canoe broadcast

The 33rd Kenduskeag Stream Canoe Race is in the books, and so is another week of intense broadcast coverage of the annual rite of spring.

Like it does for many of the paddlers competing in it, the race always seems to throw a few complications at the broadcasters. Just ask Steve Hiltz, program director at Bangor television station WABI, whose coverage was interrupted twice by a faulty generator.

“Apparently it had some oil problems and overheated, and then it burned up on us,” Hiltz said. “It started to go out once and we got it working again, but then we lost our main power again.”

The power first cut out approximately 80 minutes after WABI began its coverage at 10 a.m. The second failure, which lasted six minutes, occurred about 15 minutes later.

“We ended up taking one of our Live Eye trucks to Six Mile Falls and using that instead,” said Hiltz. “It restricted the number of cameras we had, but we were still covering that portion of the race live.”

Due to low water, slow race conditions, and the hazards posed by a 1 p.m. high tide, the race took longer to run this year – a variance which ended up benefitting WABI.

“We were supposed to go til noon, but we ended up going until about 12:40 p.m. instead,” Hiltz explained. “And because of the conditions, we picked up a lot more canoe action at Six Mile when we came back on.”

WABI employed five reporters and five cameras (four at Six Mile) for the broadcast, which was Channel 5’s second in the last two years Before a two-year TV drought which began in 19996, the race was televised by Bangor’s WLBZ nine consecutive years.

But WABI wasn’t the only station prowling the riverbanks. For the fifth straight year, Bangor all-sports radio station WZON provided live coverage of the race.

WZON program director Dale Duff said the race offers a welcome diversion to the station employees involved in its coverage.

“Yes, we do look forward to it,” Duff said. “This is a chance to do something completely different and the best thing is everyone’s in a real good mood.”

And that’s saying something for 10 guys who had to get up early (5 a.m.) on a Saturday to go to work.

“Yeah, but there’s nothing like a few cups of coffee and a plate full of beans to get you going,” Duff said with a laugh.

WZON provided 3 1/2 hours of live race coverage, which started at 8:30 a.m.

Duff said the challenge of covering an event like the Kenduskeag on the radio is overcoming the absence of pictures, especially when paddlers are running aground or going overboard at Six Mile Falls.

“Yeah, it’s tough because we can’t show that to people,” Duff said. “So we just try to do a mixture of fun with actual reporting and interviews.”

The recipe seems to work, judging from the numerous honors WZON’s race coverage has won from the Associated Press and Maine Assocation of Broadcasters the first two years (1995-96).

Duff certainly isn’t complaining.

“I think we had our best production of all five this year,” he said.

According to a USA Network media release, ratings were down for USA’s live coverage of The Masters golf tournament last week (April 8-9). Thursday’s coverage from 4 to 8 p.m., which was affected by a 90-minute rain delay, garnered a 1.7 rating, which translates into 1,281,000 households tuned to the event.

Friday’s second coverage from 4 to 7 p.m. drew a 2.6, or 1,973,000 households. The average rating (2.1, 1,578,000 households) for both rounds of coverage was down 40 percent from 1998 (3.5 rating).