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For most of Saturday’s run down Kenduskeag Stream, the experienced seven-man team that Rick O’Donald of Newburgh had helped organize did exactly what they’d planned to do.
They paddled their war canoe like crazy and (they assumed) slowly made up ground on a rival boat that always fares well in the Kenduskeag Stream Canoe Race.
Then, something bad happened. Somehow. Some way.
“No one’s admitting any blame at this point,” team member Clayton Cole of Corinth said with a grin. “[Blame] the vagaries of white water.”
The vagaries of white water are pretty simple, it seems. You can defeat your opponents, but you can never, truly beat the water.
It’s going to keep on flowing, no matter what. And if you’re lucky, you won’t end up swimming in it.
O’Donald and crew? Not so lucky.
“There’s a real lot of experience in the boat,” said O’Donald, who has been competing in area white-water races for 25 years. “Everybody wants to go one way, and everybody wants to go the other, and we just rolled up on the rock and tipped over.”
That meant that the seven top-notch paddlers in the massive 28-foot boat – Dave Smallwood of Holden, Bill Deighan of Newburgh, Paul Brown of Belfast, Greg Dorr of Bangor, Justin Wardwell of Dedham, Cole and O’Donald – were no longer paddlers at all.
They were swimmers.
And while swimming, they had to drag a 28-foot boat that O’Donald described as “a raised ranch,” and find a way to get it to shore.
“We all agree, after our mishap, that [war canoes] definitely take a lot more distance to turn,” Cole said. “You’re not going to do S-turns in the white water like you might do in a two-person or one-person canoe. You’ve got to plan ahead. It’s kind of like a freight train. Slow to start, slow to stop.”
For the record, the mishap wasn’t too costly: The crew edged the six paddlers in the 26-foot-long “Kenduskeag Screamah” by a slim five-second margin to take fourth overall in 2 hours, 9 minutes, 17 seconds.Their foes, J.R. Mabee and Leslie Mabee of Bangor, David Lee of Hancock, Chip Loring of Old Town, Tammy Kelley of Lamoine and Bill Smith of Lamoine, finished fifth overall in 2:09:22.”We were pretty clean. We were a little concerned with the other war canoe,” J.R. Mabee said. “They had a lot of power, [seven] paddlers vs. six, and they might have a couple more national medalists in their canoe than we have this year. We knew it was going to be a close battle.”
Saturday’s race was the 42nd edition of the spring classic. In all, 812 participants hopped into 431 boats and began the trip from Kenduskeag to Bangor. Participants hailed from 14 states, three Canadian provinces and the District of Columbia.
The first to arrive: Trevor MacLean and Christian Hall of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia.
MacLean won the race in a one-person kayak in 2002, 2003 and 2005 and finished second three other times.
This year brought reinforcements, a 16-year-old with a rich paddling pedigree.
Hall’s father, Tony Hall, was coach of the Canadian national team, and his son has been paddling since he was 7 or 8 years old.
Paddling, yes.
Paddling white water? No.
“It was Christian’s first time down through the white water, so it was definitely an eye-opener for him,” MacLean said. “But it’s amazing that it’s not that scary. It just looks scary.”
Paddling a boat designed for flat water, the duo finished in a speedy 1:56:46, the 11th-fastest time in race history. Robert Lang, the 11-time champion from Rothesay, New Brunswick, was second in 2:02:34, while John Cangelosi of Bangor and Jeff Owen of Old Town teamed up in a racing canoe to take third in 2:05:57. The two war canoes rounded out the top five.
Hall said he and MacLean lost a bit of time after taking on water.
“We kind of swamped today, the boat was filled with water, so we were kind of taking a nosedive by the time we got to the portage,” Hall said. “But it went pretty well.”
Racers were treated to a fabulous spring day, with a light breeze and temperatures in the low 70s.
After a five-year absence, Lang returned to the Kenduskeag, a race he dominated in the 1980s. The 52-year-old Lang won 11 titles, including six in a row from 1982 to 1987.
“I had intended to come last year, but then my good buddy had a 50th birthday party the night before, so I didn’t make it last year,” Lang said.
Lang wanted to finish in less than two hours and nearly did.”It doesn’t get any easier,” Lang said after pulling his sleek kayak out of the water.
Still, he said he continues to enjoy the race and won’t stay away so long this time.
“We’ll try to make it a habit,” Lang said.
Another paddler making a return to the Kenduskeag was Lori Dana of Solon, who participated for the first time after five years off.
Dana and her husband, Barry Dana, are elite paddlers who joined forces to take a shot at the mixed (male and female) racing class record. They finished just short of that goal but still had a good run, finishing sixth overall in 2:09:54.
“It was nice. It was a very good level,” Lori Dana said, explaining that she took the previous five races off while tending to the family’s maple syrup business. “It’s hard to do both. It all runs at the same time.”
Barry Dana, former chief of the Penobscot Indian Nation, said their close partnership in life helps in a boat.
“We stay quiet in the boat. There’s no chatter. We just paddle hard,” he said.
And Lori, who paddles from the stern seat, said a well-defined division of labor is important as well.
“You can only have one chief in the boat,” she said, smiling at the former chief.
“I’ll take that job,” Barry Dana said. “I might be the chief, but at the end, I just say, ‘Yes, dear.'”
jholyoke@bangordailynews.net
990-8214
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