Celebrate Day 7
— Celebrate Dharma Voyage —
Day 7
Westport Youth Rowing
BEN BOOTH
In 2014, Dharma Voyage had its first Westport Youth Rowing program. The high school was generous enough to promote this for us, and we gathered our first team. Auspiciously enough, the two boys who showed up the first day were both named Ben.
From there, we had many adventures. We traveled to a weekend of racing in Vermont. We won a few races in Boston Harbor at the Hull Lifesaving Museum. We started exploring horizons and took some amazing voyages: Gooseberry to Cuttyhunk and Penikese; Gooseberry to West Island, Fairhaven; Gooseberry to Cape Cod. We got into waves large enough to make the team scream and told stories late into the night on our overnight trips.
But these are experiences best told by the participants.
Included in this is a video the team made as a way to give back to the program. I’ll include a quick “behind the scenes” take:
You’ll see in the video some shots of the team rowing the coastal quad close by a camera in the water. I’m the unseen cameraman in this instance. I jumped out of the boat and told them to “row right past me a bunch of times.” The thing is, the quad is not designed to row without someone steering! It was amazing to see them all, without any instruction, figure out how to work together to control the boat without anyone at the helm. Steering a straight course would have been hard enough, but they also had to find my little bobbing head in the darkening water and navigate a precise course to get close enough for the little lens, circle around, and do it again and again. So, there’s a bit of mastery on display quite casually in this film…
The cameraman and crew in action