2005-05-01 Snake River Canoe Race through shallow rocky rapids

Avid canoe racers Rick Lorenzen and Lee Jarpey challenged Keith Canny and Doug Berg in the 2004 Snake River Canoe Race in Mora, Minnesota on May 1^st.  Keith and Doug had won the Citizen Aluminum canoe category with the fastest time of all aluminum canoes last year.  Rick and Doug were going to race aluminum too.  Partly to “lay a whoopin” on Keith and Doug and partly to save wear and tear on a good racing canoe.  The water level of 3 feet at the gauge in Mora meant that there were a lot of rocks were showing on the 15 mile stretch of river ending at the History Center in downtown Mora.  Because of some earlier friendly rivalry, I used black duct tape cut in half lengthwise to spell out “GEEZERBEATER” on the side of my aluminum canoe as a sign for Keith and Doug.  I also tried duct taping some plastic drinking straws to the back of the hull to shoot water up behind the canoe as we paddled.  That didn’t quite work like I had hoped, but it did make quite a few people laugh when they saw the straws.   

This race was unique in that over a hundred kayaks and canoes were started in groups of six because the river was so narrow and because it helped the race finish sooner.  In spite of our plans to start in the same heat with Keith and Doug, they snookered us into starting in the heat just ahead of them.  That gave them just what they wanted.  A rabbit to run down.  That meant we couldn’t let up at all.  Even so, I still had to miss a few strokes every now and then to grab my drink tube lying across my lap.  Some good racers keep the tube in their teeth the whole race to keep from missing strokes, but I had trouble doing that and had to drop it back down between drinks.  The quarter inch tube ran through a hole in the plastic cap of a 2 liter bottle filled with half Powerade and half water.  The bottle was duct taped to the thwart behind the front seat.  Lee’s bottle was stuffed into his life jacket below his seat in the stern.

We also each had 2 bananas to eat to keep us from bonking.  However, I thought I could make it without eating it since we had French toast for breakfast.  I was wrong.  I started having problems with about 4 miles left and missed 2 more strokes to wolf down half a banana.  It was too little too late.  My tired arms were shortening the strokes and I had to keep reminding myself to stretch out my bottom shoulder farther.  It was a long 4 miles with the river mostly less than a foot deep.  In racing canoes, you can pop the canoe up water that shallow, but it was close to impossible to do in a much wider and heavier aluminum hull.  Hitting the rocky bottom every paddle made it harder to get a good stroke.  Lee kept reminding me to reach every few minutes.

I spent many childhood Saturdays inner tubing a shallow creek learning how to quickly “read” the deepest channel through the rocks in the shallows with my own posterior at stake.  Since it was my canoe, I got to be in the bow.  Lee had apparently done just as much research on rapids because we always seemed to agree on the same line coming into the dozen or more shallow rapids.  At every rapids, we consulted each other on which side of the river to come into the rapids.  Once we started into the rapids, the bow person called “Straight!”, “Left!”, or “Right!” every few seconds to let the stern paddler know which way to steer the canoe.  It was critical to keep as much speed as possible by paddling through the rapids.  Several rocks gouged at the aluminum hull and slowed us up in the course of the two and a half hours, but were never stopped completely. 

Two hours, twenty-four minutes and eight seconds and two hours, twenty-four minutes and fifty seconds were their times.  Keith & Doug got stuck on a rock and Rick and Lee beat them by only 42 seconds so it was effectively a draw.   Norm Strike and Al Dubois also raced in an aluminum canoe and also hit a rock and spun sideways and were stuck much longer before resuming the race.  If these 3 canoes had started in the same heat and none of them had hit any rocks, it may have been a 3 way tie.  However, we all knew that the rocks were part of the challenge of this canoe race.  After the race, Keith gave me a 16 ounce bottle of Powerade with a label that said “New and Improved WhoopAss”.   I’m sure he would have preferred to have the faster time, but he and Doug would have to settle for their first place medals instead.   There will be other races for both of us.  Hopefully, I would paddle with them in a race or two in some of those races.   

In the hopes of allowing more citizen’s who paddle aluminum to win medals, Rick and Lee entered the race in the Open Racing category.  We knew that all the other canoes in that category would be faster models.  The other racers entered the Citizen Aluminum category. Because of this, Keith and Doug and Norm and Al won 1^st and 2^nd place medals even though Rick and Lee had a faster time by 42 seconds.  The 3^rd place medal winners have only raced once a year in the Snake River Canoe Race, but rarely practiced racing and rarely enter any other canoe races.  They would normally have won 1^st place medals in their Citizen Aluminum age and gender category, but this time they got a 3^rd place medal.  Hopefully, this would be enough to convince them to join us for more races and practices this summer.  If we hadn’t raced in aluminums, they could have convinced themselves that it was our faster canoe hulls that made the difference.